Goodbye Guangzhou

I had no idea how sad I would be to leave Guangzhou. I have loved getting to know the Sun Yat-Sen University students here, they are all so amazing!! They are seriously some of the most kind people I have met. On top of missing my friends, I had no idea how sad I would be to leave the branch I was attending for church.

Okay I'm going to get spiritual really quick, so bear with me. One thing that I learned in China is that the gospel is true no matter where you are in the world. In China, we aren't allowed to talk about our religion because it's against the law. The LDS church made an agreement with the Chinese government where we are allowed to practice our religion as long as we don't speak of it with others or proselyte to the chinese people. So because of that, the branch I went to was rather small, but the faith they had in the church was so great. Everyone there was so kind and so genuine and they really wanted to make sure that we felt at home while attending their branch. Even though I was only there for 5 weeks I totally felt their love. And that's one reason why I love this church, because of the spirit people radiate when they have the gospel in their life. You can go anywhere in the world and the gospel is the same. It was a little difficult though not being able to talk about it...some of the friends we made on this study abroad were very interested in learning about the church and we couldn't tell them because of the laws, which made me so sad because some of them are totally ready to receive the gospel. But it's okay, I know the Lord is looking out for them and loves them nonetheless.
Alright and that's my 2 cents on that, thank you!

We had a farewell dinner with all of the students the last night we were in Guangzhou and it was so bitter sweet. It was exciting because we were going to start our culture trip, which meant we were going to travel all around China, but I was sad because I had become such good friends with some of the students and I knew that I would really miss them. Also my WeChat locked me out and I can't get back on so I'm not even able to talk to most of them, I'm super bummed... But the last night with them was so fun!! We had a really good dinner and then we stayed at the hotel for about 30 minutes and took pictures with all of our friends and said our goodbyes. A bunch of us invited some of the chinese students to come back with us to the hotel on campus that we were staying at to play games. So we had a party and played BS with them for a little bit (until the game just got boring) and then we played mafia or werewolves (whatever you like to call it). And oh my word...they are so funny. I have always played the game where people say whatever they want, when they want it but the chinese students play it where you go around in a circle and say what you have to say once, then if you want to add something you have to ask for permission. It was a lot more structured that way, and the game honestly went a lot faster. Also I'm not as good at lying when I can't just burst out and say something haha so it was difficult!! ALSO we played 3 times and ALL 3 TIMES I was a mafia!!!! It was the worst. I hate lying. It was so fun to play games with them though, I really hope I get to see them again some day. I'm so grateful so social media so I can stay in touch with them from halfway across the world. Go technology!!

Dean and Zac

Get Some Dim Sum's last hurrah together

The whole BYU/SYSU crew

My crew

Me attacking Dean per usual

Monkey Business in Zhangjiajie

Zhangjiajie was a dream.
Getting there wasn't though. We took a night train to get there and they aren't exactly the most comfortable. I mean, I was honestly okay because I can sleep anywhere (like my kitchen floor for example) but it was a little cramped. So the set-up is like this: there are open compartments that have 6 beds in them. Three on one wall and three on the other. The bottom bunks had more space, which means that the middle and top bunks were squished together. Guess which one I was on? The middle!!! I wasn't able to sit up straight so I had to just lay down. It made getting ready for bed really difficult but I managed and I totally slept fine so it was okay.

The first day there we were there we went to Tianmen mountain, which is the mountain with the hole in it. Apparently at one point they flew a small plane through the hole so that's cool! We took a tram up the mountain and the overhead views were incredible!! We got to the top and it was just beautiful. Then Eric took out a hot dog weiner and started eating it, because apparently that's what people do in China. So naturally I took a bite because I was just trying to embrace the culture and he offered...bad idea. It was disgusting. It was like the texture of cheese but with the taste of every scrap food imaginable. Pro-tip: don't eat them. I'm not sure what I was expecting though. Besides that super cool mountain and the gross weiner thing, we got to walk on glass walkways that were built on the side of a mountain so when you look through the glass you just see the ground super far below. I LOVED it. Honestly I just really love things like that, like the Sky Deck in the Sears Tower...man I love it. After the walkways we were given time to explore on our own (and by that I mean we still went in groups so we didn't get lost and die). We went to different viewpoints and wowza I love nature. There was just so much to see with the mountains and the fog. Oh the fog, it was pretty foggy that day. We hiked up to a different glass walkway and right when we got there the fog swept in and we couldn't see the mountains at all, it was pretty sad but it looked mysterious in all of the pictures so I would count that as a partial win! After wandering around for about an hour, we regrouped and headed back down the mountain, but this time instead of taking a tram we took a bus down. Down a road with 99 turns. Where almost all of the turns are 180 degrees. It was a wild ride and a lot of people got car sick but it was fun! Now I can say that I've been on a road down a mountain that has 99 turns so go me!!

The next day we went to Zhangjiajie National Park and WOW. I am still in awe. The movie Avatar (the one with the blue people) has geography that was based off of the landscape from this park. I just have no idea how these mountains were formed and how they're still standing. Some of them were top-heavy and it looks like they could fall at any moment. This place was absolutely amazing. We first rode up the Bailong elevator, which is a glass elevator that takes you up to the top of the park in like 80 seconds and it moves super fast so you can feel your ears going insane...or maybe I just have sensitive ears haha. It was pretty cool but it was also really rainy so it was hard to see out of the elevator. I still had a great time though! From there we just walked through the main route of the park. It has a lot of branch offs from the main path and they lead to some super beautiful viewpoints. I keep talking about all of these viewpoints and you're probably getting annoyed haha but there are just so many!!! At one of the branches, I weaseled my way into a picture spot and when I got a picture there all of these Chinese people just started swarming and taking pictures with me. I'm not that used to that because my friend Elizabeth has super blonde hair, so normally she gets asked to take pictures all of the time, and by the end I couldn't feel my cheeks. It was legitimately 15 minutes of taking pictures with people...at one point there was a line of Chinese people who wanted their picture with us, and when that happened my friend and I decided that we needed to escape. So we dipped. We caught up with our other friends and just took our time walking through the park. It was just so breathtaking. At one point while we were walking (our destination was a large natural land bridge) we ran into a group of Chinese tourist that were all middle aged women enjoying life. They took a picture with my friend Nick and me and then afterwards they started having a conversation with us. My friend Nick served an LDS mission that was Chinese-speaking so he knew what they were saying and was able to communicate with them, but there were also 4 women trying to talk to him at once so that was rough. Then there was one lady talking to me and she was just having the time of her life, being super upbeat during our "conversation". I said "xia xia" once, which means "thank you" because I don't know much Chinese and she turns and says to Nick in Chinese "wow, my english is so horrible and her chinese is amazing, I am just so impressed!!" For the record, I have been told that my chinese is amazing multiple times on this trip and 7 out of the 8 times it has been when I was with my friends Nick and Eli, both of whom served chinese speaking missions haha. I am very proud of it.

OKAY GUYS NOW IT'S TIME FOR THE MONKEYS!!!!! I had sooo much fun with the monkeys. One of the professors named Chia-Chi was feeding the monkeys bread and I also wanted to feed them because I love animals, so when I was on the stairs I was stupid and decided to pull out some of my breakfast biscuits and then this RAGING MONKEY MOTHER RAN AT ME. Naturally I screamed and ran down the stairs because this monkey was screeching at me and it had a child so I aborted that mission real quick. It was wild. I didn't feed that monkey. We went down to this creek and I walked around in the water and I also ate a snickers because there weren't any monkeys around and I was starving so that was a blessing! We walked back to the place where it was hopping with monkeys and that's where I sat down and fed them!! Chia-Chi gave me some of his bread and I just went at it. Right when I made the bread visible, the monkeys started flocking to me and they circled me like vultures haha, oh it was great. I eventually sat down and the I just felt so close to the monkeys, I mean physically I was close yes, but also at one point I held hands with a monkey <3. It was so tender. Then while he held my hand he stole a huge chunk of bread from me. Moral of the story: don't hold hands with boys. Anyways the monkeys ate and were merry. Twas a good time and I sadly left without a monkey.

Zhangjiajie was a dream!! I've decided that I will return one day and I'm going to go visit my monkey friends again :)

part of the 99 turn road

holding hands <3

Guilin - 2 weeks late but still in love

Heyo my friends!!
The combination of not having good wifi and traveling around, made it difficult to find time to post this! (I typed it up not long after returning home from Guilin so some time reference words might be wrong but I'm too lazy to retype it)

Last week we went to Guilin and it was absolutely amazing. First of all we took a bullet train and honestly I thought it was going to go way faster but it was the smoothest train ride I've ever been on so that was nice. That night we took a bus up to the Dragon's Backbone and we stayed in a hotel in the mountains. Our rooms definitely looked and felt like a cabin, from the wooden bed frames to the cockroach that we found crawling around in our room. Also the beds were rock hard. After a long day I plopped myself down on my bed and nearly broke my butt...not pleasant. But it was an adventure so you already know that I loved every minute of it.

The next day we woke up and hiked around the Dragon's Backbone, which is rice terraced fields and it was absolutely beautiful. We were literally walking up the rice fields to get to a super cool viewpoint. For the first part of the hike it was raining pretty badly. We all had umbrellas but we were getting pounded by these rain drops. We had to stop under a little shack and wait for it to pass before we went on. I love rain so I didn't really mind and we also got to meet these very nice photographers. They had this super huge Nikon camera and they totally made fun of my smaller Nikon. But don't worry guys I wasn't offended because I know I still take amazing pictures (I'm super humble haven't you noticed?) The rain stopped just long enough for us to hike to the top, take a lot of shamelessly touristy pictures, and hike back down the rice terraces to the bus at the bottom of the mountain. When I say "just long enough" I mean that it started raining as the bus was in our line of sight so we all booked it so we wouldn't get wet. It was seriously perfect though. I would love to take my parents there because they would totally love it there.
After we got back down, we saw a show by the Yao women, an indigenous people from Guilin. The women never cut their hair and they wash their hair with the water left over from cooking rice. Those are just what I remember the tour guide telling us haha. During their performance all of the women had their hair tied up so we didn't see their magnificent locks until later. BUT something wild happened before that. They took 4 guys from our study abroad on stage to be part of the performance. They had no idea what was coming. Apparently they got married to some of the single ladies and drank this super nasty drink a couple times. It was pretty weird and none of us knew exactly knew what was happening and by the end we were all just so confused. Then I went up on stage and started dancing with them, I had a grand time. I also had no idea how to dance in sync with them but that's why I didn't do dance when I was little.
The dinners in Guilin were so good. They cook out of bamboo a lot there so we had fried rice and chicken out of a bamboo stick a couple times while we were there and it was divine. I just really like food, no shame.

The next day we went on a ferry tour on the river through the mountains and I definitely took some model pictures of some friends (I am having so much fun with my camera wow). This ferry tour was honestly so cool, the scenery was what I expected to see when I heard we were coming to Guilin. Oh my lanta at one point we saw a corpse drifting down the river, I mean it could have been a mannequin but it was an ultra fat mannequin if it was, I don't think there are many mannequins in Guilin, let alone fat ones. Either way that was wild. After the ferry we went on bamboo rafts and floated a different river. That was so rad. Since there's an odd number of girls, I went on the raft with my friend Jason and our friends Eli and Nick teased our guide saying that we were going to get married and we totally just went with it, it was so fun. (Don't worry mom and dad it was a joke, I'm not getting married). Anyways, the bamboo raft was amazing and very peaceful. I loved it so much. Also I wore a lifejacket this time!! So I didn't almost die! (Referring to my kayaking story if you know it)

I'm not super great at writing so this may have sounded lame but it was honestly one of the coolest things I've ever done. I hope the pictures do this place justice because it was gorgeous.

HONG KONG

Hong Kong was SO. COOL. You just can't do Hong Kong in 2 days, so I'm sad we weren't able to stay longer. The first day was kind of a wild ride haha. So after we got to Hong Kong from Guangzhou by train, our professors took us out to lunch. One of my friends on the trip is allergic to peanuts and he's super careful about what he eats, making sure that none of it has peanuts or is made in the same pan because allergic reactions aren't fun. So we ate lunch and our professor told us that we could go off on our own as long we were in a group of 4 or more, so a group of friends and I went off to the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery while everyone else stayed with the professors and explored around the city. As we were transferring subway stations, this friend stops us and says he's having an allergic reaction. Luckily at this transfer station there was one of the biggest hospitals in Hong Kong and it was only a quarter of a mile away. He took his epipen because it got pretty bad and we all walked him over there, making sure he was okay. We called our professors to tell them what happened and they came to the hospital to help with the insurance that the study abroad provides for us. We got him there in time and everything turned out alright. Luckily the hospital accepted the insurance and it covered the cost of the whole trip, so that's a blessing. Honestly for a group of college students, I think we handled the situation very well, we stayed calm and were able to find him a hospital fast. I'm proud.

While he was being nursed back to health, the rest of us went onto the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery. Fun fact: there are actually thirteen thousand buddhas; I don't know who named this monastery but maybe they're extremely humble because they downplayed what they have by three thousand buddhas hahaha. So while walking up this mountain, the path was lined with golden buddhas, it was honestly super cool to look ahead and see it go on forever. When you reached the end of this first path it led to a Buddhist temple where there were thousands of tiny buddhas lining the walls. And this wasn't a small room either. It looked super cool behind the big Buddha. Then when you explore around the monastery you can go up further to a place where there's a large white Buddha against the mountain and a bunch of golden buddhas all around the mountain side near a waterfall. Then right next to those was a super cool lookout of downtown Hong Kong. Honestly it was incredible to see so many buddhas in one day.

After we left the monastery we were trying to meet up with the rest of the group so we could go to a cool viewpoint up on Victoria Peak to see Hong Kong at sunset and at night. However, we got a little lost haha. We ended up taking a bus 7 stops past where we needed to be, so we had to take the subway back to the right place. Then when we got to Victoria peak, we went to a different viewpoint than the rest of the group because we didn't know where we were going. They saw the typical overview picture of Hong Kong, which is super cool, whereas we saw the backside of Hong Kong where it was more mountainous. Honestly though, I didn't mind. It was super cool to see the ocean and all of the islands at dusk. The only thing is we all started running to get to the viewpoint before sunset and if you know me, you know that I am NOT a runner. Especially in chacos and a backpack. I'm positive I looked like a complete dork, but what else is new?? After the viewpoint on Victoria Peak, we went back down the mountain and took a ferry from the island back to the side of Hong Kong that our hotel was on. The ferry ride was super cool because they have these boats called "junk boats" but they honestly look like pirate ships and I really wanted to see Jack Sparrow or something. It was super cool to have the city in the background and then to have pirate ships in front. Talk about aesthetic. Then a group of guys and I went to this super cool spot that had a perfect view of the city at night. We took some sick pics with each other and then headed back to the hotel, where the Ladies Market is. The Ladies Market is this street market where you can barter for things to get them super cheap. They had some cute knick knacks there but 1. I'm horrible at bartering and 2. I didn't think any of it was really worth my money, so I didn't get anything. I know. I'm lame. But I'm not broke so that's cool!!

Okay the next day was probably my favorite.

We got to go to the LDS Hong Kong temple!!! It was so nice to go do temple work again. It's always refreshing to do service in the Lord's temple. I had the opportunity to talk to a woman doing baptisms with me and she was from India. She said that the Hong Kong temple is the closest temple to her and she and her husband don't get to come very often so when they do, they pretty much do everything that you can at the temple. It was cool to hear about how they still make it a priority to come to the temple even though it is so far away from them. Truly inspirational to me. It made me so grateful to have temples so close to where I live. The temple was absolutely gorgeous inside and out. It had a beautiful simplicity to it that I just really loved. After the temple we went to the mission office so we could change into street clothes. When we were there we ran into some elders playing basketball and we got to talk to them for awhile, I think they were surprised to see so many white people in their office building haha. Just a little piece of home for them (they were from Idaho and Utah).

After the temple, a huge group of us went to Lamma Island, one of the many islands around Hong Kong. It's this little fisherman village island and it was SO COOL. We took a ferry to get there and there were all of these cute little boats docked on the harbor. We ate at this restaurant with a beautiful view of the ocean. Wow just writing about the ocean gets me excited!!! I'm smiling so much right now hahaha I'm so lame. We walked through this market to get to the beach and we waded around in the ocean. How have I not been to the ocean before?!?!?!! (I mean I've been landlocked my whole life so I guess that's how) but WOW it's so cool!!! I was so genuinely happy yesterday it was so good oh my lanta. Now I know why I got made fun of for not seeing the ocean. After I got over the fact that I was actually in the ocean, a group of us went exploring around these huge rocks on the side of beach. We went out on these rocks in the ocean, then we sort of rock climbed up to this super cool spot. I loved it because I was (sort of) rock climbing next to the ocean. It was way cooler than it sounds. I'm just horrible at describing things. Super neat though. We hung out and explored for awhile until it was time to leave. Then we walked back and looked through the shops and such. There were actually a lot of cool little artisan things but boy oh boy were they overpriced. Ya girl can't spend all of her money on a painted rock. But honestly, the island just had a super cool atmosphere and I would not be opposed to going back one day.

All in all, Hong Kong was amazing. Also a lot of people speak english there so that was a blessing, I was actually able to communicate with people around me!! 10/10 would live in Hong Kong.