The Amazing Race in China

We're home! Blurry-eyed and sleep-deprived, but we're home. After a shower and a nap, we wanted to watch the 2 episodes of The Amazing Race that we had missed. Coincidentally, they were the 3 episodes in China!

Their first stop was Guilin. We were there! It was a blast to see the same places on TV that we had just been at: the neon palm trees at the Guilin airport; the Li River; the cormorants catching fish (with strings around their throats so they wouldn't swallow); bottled water (everyone, including all the Chinese people must drink it); the huge sun and moon pagodas on banyan lake; the foot massages (we got reflexology massages drinking tea and sitting in the same type of 3 chairs to a room, but not nearly as painful); Tammy saying "shie shie" all the time, which means "thank you." We knew that! What they didn't show in the Li River was this: we saw all in a matter of a few minutes...a man "relieving himself" in the river, a man swimming in the river, a woman washing her body in the river and a woman doing laundry in the river. Ugh.

We saw lots of strange food for sale in the open-air markets, but never saw grasshopper, starfish, scorpions, or larvae on any menu. Actually, most of our Chinese food in restaurants was pre-ordered for us. The TAR task involving repeating orders for food in the restaurant would have been next to impossible to do. The Chinese language has 5 tones; we have 7 tones. They can say MA in a variety of ways to mean 5 different things. It could mean mother, sweaty, horse, slow, and a curse word, depending on the inflection. The tiniest change in inflection totally changes a word. What a difficult language!

We caught up on all 3 China TAR episodes and are now ready for the finale. I don't even want to tell you what the infamous porta potty might have looked like!

I'll get to my China journal soon. I learned enough to fill a year of schooling on China. It was a fabulous trip, but it's good to be back.