The four and half months spent in Beijing were probably some of the best months of my life. I had a very great time, but like most things in life it could not last forever. I am happy to be at home, but at the same time I am also sad that tomorrow or the next day I am not going to wake up in my apartment at Tsinghua. I will not be able to go to class with all my friends and then eat the mediocre food at school cafeteria number 10.

My flight was nice. I sat next to a girl from Canada who is studying to be a nutrionist. Neither of us really wanted to be on the plane. We were both leaving people back in Beijing. She had just finished seeing her family for the first time in four years. We both had mixed feelings of leaving the place where we wanted to stay, but knowing we had to go back to the place where we needed to be.

When we landed in Canada we said our goodbyes, she went through customs and I went for the direct transfer to the states. This is where the ‘fun’ began. As I walked down the skybridge I walked over customs downstairs and passed a sign telling me that anyone on Air China flights were supposed to go this direction. I met a worker at the airport who insistently told me that I was not supposed to be there. I told him that I was on Air China, but he still refused. Anyways, I went back through customs since I knew I did not have a lot of time and I did not want to argue with him. I went through customs and asked where my bags would be and they told me they would be on carousel 24. I went to the carousel, but never say my bags. I went to the nearest help desk and they said my bags were upstairs, so I headed upstairs. Right before I went upstairs I looked back at the carousel and saw one of my boxes. At this point I was asking myself whether or not anyone in this airport knew what was going on. Anyways I worked my way upstairs again by walking past the front door, up an escalator and through the food court. At this point it was 11:30 and my flight was supposed to leave at 12:00. I got in line for a boarding pass and all the while I was thinking about the the guy who told me I was going the wrong way and how he should be fired. I got to the counter at 11:45 and was promptly asked by the woman whether or not I knew my international flight was at noon. After sleeping only a few hours in the past thirty or so hours it was easy to just listen and not tell her that I really wanted to be here 15 minutes before my flight and that I expected with 15 minutes I would have enough time to get on an international flight. I was pretty fed up with this airport by this time. Anyways to make a long story short I ended up getting on my flight after watching a security yell at a man for trying to make sure his luggage was going to the right city. I was also told my luggage was on the same flight, but it arrived in Seattle on the next flight.

The whole trip back was made better when I got back to see all my friends. We went out to dinner at Red Robins to eat some burgers. Even though I was really tired I was excited to talk to everyone after four months.

If anyone is interested, here are photos from my last dinner in Beijing.

Today is my last Beijing for a while. I am not sure how long it will be, but I would really like to come back at some point. Maybe to live, maybe to work or maybe just to travel. Whatever the reason is does not matter much to me. I would just like this time in Beijing to be my last time here.

This evening I had a blast hanging out with my classmates, friends and teachers. I was really touched that they all decided to come and see me one last time. We ate a lot of food, chatted it up, made some jokes, said goodbyes and then we left the restaurant. Afterwards MCK, Taylor, Kitty, Aaron, 婷婷 and I went to McDonalds since 婷婷 had not eaten dinner yet.

I made it home around 11:30. I decided to try and hang out with Kitty some more, but by the time I cabbed it over to BCLU I realized she was not in the dorm. I am not sure where she went to stay, but she never answered my text messages, so I went back home. I think I was just trying to find a way to avoiding packing. The process of packing puts closure on my trip and it is closure that I don’t want just quite yet.

Tonight I have been slowly packing and organizing myself. I had to get all the info off my cell phone since I won’t be taking it home. My classmate wanted it, so I told her she could use it and once she is done she can just send it back to me through the mail. I also needed to write some text messages to tell people to change the numbers of the cell phone since it will no longer be my number, but her’s. Besides this I have pretty much packed everything up except for what I need tomorrow. The process of packing was pretty somber. It had to be done eventually and I knew it all along, but that did not make it any easier. I wish going home was as easy as coming here.

Something that did make the evening nice was reading some of my friend’s blogs. Alissa recently went on a trip to Xi’an and she explains many of the nuances to traveling in China very well. I could not count all the times her story made me think about my own experiences. I recommend who wants to know about the often ignored aspects of traveling in China should read this passage.

The second blog that made me happy was the one written by 婷婷. It is not much and it is in Chinese, but it provides a brief description of me. It was interesting to see how she described me. It is nothing outrageous or scandalous, but it was simple and correct. I paid homage to her by entitling this entry with one similar to hers. If you want to read some Chinese once and for all, read 小普要走了。。。

I am going to catch my flight in about 10 hours from now. Before then I have to write some postcards, burn comes cds, have coffee with my friend Wendy and eat lunch with the usual lunchtime crowd and my landlord. I think that is enough to distract me from thinking about leaving too much. On the other hand I am really excited to see everyone back at home, especially Eric and Sandra. Interestingly enough, this was the longest time I was apart from my brother. It was not too bad actually. It might have been because I have been over here in China doing what I have wanted to do for a while and having fun. I am not too sure how he felt about it. I am sure he handled it fine and thought the time flew by.

Well I think this entry is just about done. I think it is late enough to brush my teeth now without disturbing my landlord, so I am going to go do that and the survey my situation a couple more times and then call my friend for coffee.

I also here it is snowing in Seattle, so I am excited that I get to arrive in time for the snow.

So my time in China is winding down. I have less than two days before I leave. I only really have about 48 hours until I leave Beijing. I have been trying to avoid thinking about it, but whenever I have spare time I have thought about leaving. I have been busy enough this week to not think about things too much, but it is getting harder.

I know that Friday night I won’t be able to hang out with MCK, Taylor or any of my other friends. I know that I won’t be able to go eat dumplings on the weekend at the local cafteria. I won’t be able to see my friends Kitty, Wenday and Sunny. I can’t just pick up my cell phone, give them a call and hang out. I won’t be able to have any more snowball fights with classmates here. Even though I am not the biggest fan of fixing computers (or trying to), I won’t be able to try and help my classmates do this anymore. I won’t be able to enjoy the smiles I see when I chat with my teachers. I won’t be able to ride my skateboard to class in the morning. I won’t be able to see everyone ice skating on the frozen pond. I won’t be able to eat dinner with my 73 year old landlord.

There are too many things I won’t be able to do, so I guess I should focus on what I can do when I get back to Seattle.

Tonight was a fun night. I went out to dinner with a few of my classmates, specifically Tammy, Janny, Cassie, Carolyn and Sonia. We walked to a nearby restaurant and ate some great food thanks to Tammy and Janny. We chatted about all sorts of things, especially my trip to Yunnan. A few of them plan to go, so they wanted me to share my experiences with them. After dinner they gave me a little present. It was a little skateboard keychain. I was really appreciative that they gave it to me. It means that they were somewhere and saw this little keychain with a skateboard on it and mut have said to themselves, ‘oh wow, Jon would really like this’. That in itself makes it even better.

After we ate dinner we all walked back to their apartments. I checked Janny and Tammy’s new apartment, had a beer and chatted it up. After a few minutes I had to leave to meet Sunny. She wanted to see my pictures of Yunnan because she has been there before. I thought we would be able to check them out online, but that wasn’t working out to well, so we decided to go look at the photos she took while she travelled around Yunnan and other parts of China.

After we looked through all the pictures and she scolded me for not visiting some places in Beijing she showed me where to catch a cab. I slowly walked across campus on the slippery ground to where I could catch a cab and then left. That pretty much brings me up to this point. Right now I am just uploading the more than four hundred photos I took while traveling in Yunnan. I hope you guys enjoy looking at them. I took them for you guys.

This morning we arrived in Lijiang pretty early in the morning. We didn’t have a lot of time to dilly dally because Fredo was flying back to Beijing in the early evening and we needed to visit the Stone Forest before he left. As soon as we got to Lijiang was found the bus station and started to figure out how we were going to get there. Because we arrived so early the station was not yet open. We waited around outside, so, of course, other people offering the ‘same’ service started offering us prices to take us to the Stone Forest. We started talking to them, but knew we were going to wait until the station opened to see what the prices they offered were.

During the process of waiting and talking to everyone we were guaranteed that no one would be able to give us better prices. They were basically saying whatever they could to get us to go. One guy even started laughing at us while he was talking to his friend about us. I am glad he really didn’t know that we knew he was trying to rip us off because they confirmed our choice of not going with him.

We got another price from one young guy which were pretty cheap and the driver would wait around at the Stone Forest for us and take us back to Lijiang. This was ideal because the price was cheap and included the ‘road fees’ and everything. Little did we know we were going to be taken by Wario!

The beginning of the car ride was nice. Wario was sort of talkative. He was a little loud, but it was funny. He also tried to get us to pay the fees for the highway, but over the radio we were told that the highway was closed, so we knew that everyone was trying to rip us off again. Wario knew that we knew, so he joked about it. After about an hour or so Wario lit up a cigarette inside the car. We all protested, but to no avail. He lit up a cigarette and happily smoked it. This made us all uncomfortable and sort of pissed us off. The kicker was that Wario decided to stop for breakfast ten minutes later. Besides the fact that he did not tell us and we were not paying to sit by the road while he ate, was that he could have waited a measly ten minutes before smoking his damn cigarette!

When we made it to the Stone Forest we were disappointed with Wario, so we knew that we were not going to pay any more money than what we agreed to in the morning.

The Stone Forest was pretty uneventful. It is a pretty nice place, but I would recommend going during the spring or summer. During the winter I think it is too cold to make it worthwhile. After walking around and seeing some big rocks MCK tripped over a large ill-placed rock in the trail and fell over. It was the most hilarious part of the morning because it was one of those falls where he made a lot of noice because he was carrying a lot of stuff. As he was falling over this rock he was trying to catch himself, but it was not working. After what sounded like ten seconds of falling (think of Homer falling down the Springfield gorge after trying to jump it on a skateboard) the incident with the crash of a broken bottle. On top of hurting his knees MCK broke his bottle of Sprite that he was taking home to add to his collection of Chinese soda bottles.

After walking around the Stone Forest for about an hour we had pretty much seen all there was to see. We ended up running into some friends we met in Dali (see picture below), so we kicked it with them for a little while and then had lunch and bought a few little trinkets.

The ride back was peaceful because there was no smoking and Wario did not want to listen to any music. We were all exhausted, so everyone except for me took naps. I started zoning out, but once we started driving down a bumpy road I was shaken back to reality. For one, the road was really bumpy and, two, I did not remember driving down this road on the way to the Stone Forest. After a quick left turn we were driving up a steep hill to a big Bhuddist temple. Wario said he was doing business and getting money from the temple. I mean who does this kind of business and what kind of business is that? Maybe he was covering up for his daily practice of praying. Whatever, either way he was happy. So happy that he sped out that place like a bat out of hell. I thought we were going to hit someone crossing the road, but we made it out safe.

The rest of the trip was calm until we reached the city. We paid the first half of the 200 dollars before we left in the morning and had to pay the second half on the way back. We were all tired and grumpy when we were getting out of the van. Then Wario tried to make us pay more money, so Fredo gave him a piece of his mind and told him to go talk to his partner because he wasn’t getting shit from us and slammed the door in his face. He was not so happy about that, so we quickly went back to the bus station to grab our bags. After that we hopped into the nearest cab and went the other direction.

Right now I am on a train from Dali to Kunming and I can’t get back to sleep. We stopped at a station a while ago, but I have not been able to get back to sleep since then. I started thinking about everything we have done for the past couple days because I want to remember it. I want to write it down before Iforget. The biggest thing that has stood out has been all the people we have met along then way.

I think some of my best memories from this trip will simply be the ones where my friends and I talked to people. It all started at Tiger Leaping Gorge. We reached the halfway point of the hike pretty early on day, but decided relax that evening and stay at the halfway house. I am super glad we did because we met with people from all over Europe. We all ate dinner together and chatted in front of the gorge. The scenery was amazing and the mood was great.

Even more fun than chatting with people from France, Norway, Sweden, Australia and Israel was chatting with the owner and employees of the hotel right before bed. As we were heading towards bed we noticed the hot coals the employees were sitting around and decided to hang out and chat with them for a while after they invited us to sit down.

One of the people that was chatting with the employees and us in the evening was also eating breakfast in the same place the next morning, so when we wanted to take a picture with everyone we of course asked him. Later in the day we saw him again and decided to take a cab to the closest city where we would hop in another car back to Lijiang. After some great haggling done by the man’s lady friend the six of us then hopped in another car and drove down to Lijiang. On the way back home we decided to eat dinner together in the Old Town in Lijiang. We spent about three or four hours just chatting by the side of a small canal in Old Town.

After checking Old Town in Dali this afternoon we were riding the bus to train station when Aaron struck up a conversation with the young girl next to him. We talked about the classes she is taking. It was great to hear that she would rather go to school than not go to school. That comment made me smile inside. She also ended up telling us the history of some of the pagodas that we saw during the afternoon, so it was a very fruitful conversation. Aaron and I told her that we could be her teacher since she was our history teacher. She wanted us to teach her English, so we agreed to be pen pals, but not in so many words.

Right now I am sleeping across from a twenty five year old woman from Xi’an. She originally studied computer science in school, but now her work is not related to computers. She decided she would rather interact with people than computers, so she changed her industry. She also has a few companions on the trip that we talked to for a while as well. They showed a lot of interest in the little red books of Mao Zei Dong’s essays that we picked up today. It was fascinating to hear them talk about their experiences with the books. Some of them were older, so they mentioned how they would spend all their time outside of class studying these books, but the young lady does not know much about the books. It was apparent in her comments and the ones of her older friends. It was a great expression of the changing mindset of Chinese people.

As I was thinking about all these experiences I could not help but be reminded of a TV show my dad used to watch. I cannot recall the name, but it was a show hosted by a English or Australian man who would ride trains around the world and document his journies and turn them into documentaries shown every week or so. I did not really understand what was so compelling about a journey like this, but now I can understand. You might meet a person one day and say ‘hello’ to them. You might see them that evening or the next day or maybe never again, but it is great for the short amount of time you are together to share your experiences. It doesn’t matter where you are from, what you like to do or how old you are, when you meet someone traveling you have a chance to learn something new and make a new friend. Hopefully it will end up being an experience that neither party forgets and if so, it is not a big deal because you enjoyed the time you were together.

I am not really sure where this thought started, where it ended up or where it was supposed to go, but essentially I am thrilled to have this last experience traveling because it gives me so many chances to meet new people and connect with a culture that is not my own and gain experiences that not a lot of other people get the chance to experience.

Returning to Kunming to Lijiang was a lot more pleasurable than traveling from Kunming to Lijiang on that bumpy, dusty and musty overnight bus. For our return trip we chose to take a bus to Dali from Lijiang. From Dali we would then take an overnight to Kunming. This seems like the best choice to travel from Lijiang to Kunming.

In Dali we visited the Old Town. Like Lijiang’s Old Town this place was for tourists, so it had it’s appeal, but at the same time we all knew it was for tourists, so it was not 100% authentic. Dali is a great little town with a lake just down the hill and a huge looming mountain behind. Because of the all the mountains right behind the city there are lots of backpackers and hikers who use Dali as a starting point for their travels. This means that you will find a store selling North Face jackets or outdoor supplies on almost every block.

For lunch that day we wanted to find a restaurant recommended in the our guide book, but after talking to some locals we learned it had been torn down. So we got a recommendation from some girls selling North Face jackets. When we found the place we were told that there was no menu. The man told us all we needed to do was pick out what we wanted to eat and how he wanted us to prepare. This was a pretty neat experience. It was also great how we could customize our dishes to all of our tastes or requirements. The owner was even nice enough to let us watch him cook the dishes after he had taken all of our orders.

The afternoon was pretty relaxing. It basically involved a little shopping for gifts and riding bicycles around. There are plenty of places to rent bicycles that you can take for the whole day. We only rode for a couple hours because we needed to catch our train, but we still had plenty of time to ride down to the nearby lake and the Three Pagodas.

Dali is a nice place to stay, but I think it is kind of small. Despite this, I hear that there are lots of people who get to Dali and end up staying longer than they expect. I think it might be related to how easy it is to get drugs. I was not approached, but my friends were approached by a couple ladies offering to sell them weed. It was great because it was unexpected. These ladies dressed up in some sort of traditional dress would approach them and try to sell them a bunch souvenirs, but then when it was obvious they were not interested, the ladies would immediately try to sell them pot. Apparently there is also a great shoe repair economy in Dali, or so it seems from the number of shops. One man approached me from across the street and told me that I needed my shoes repaired. I reassured him that they were fine, but he insisted and then bent over to point something out on my shoe. Not really paying to my shoes in the last couple days I thought that maybe something was wrong, but I soon realized he wasn’t pointing at anything. He just tried to find anything wrong with my shoe and point it out. Eventually he gave up and we moved on.

After a bus ride to the airport where we met a nice young girl who was excited to learn and go to school and a train where I met a fellow computer scientist turned hotel manager who dreamed about traveling around the world we made it Kunming very early in the morning. We did not get a chance to ring in the new year because the lights on the train were turned off before midnight.