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.