| | Where in the World is Venus Chung?
This semester, that's been a really hard question to answer. At the beginning of the semester, though my body was in Qingdao, China, my heart was in San Francisco (see previous entry). Then, when I realized that my heart had grown to include Qingdao, my body took off for a countless other places.
Almost every other weekend, I visited a different city in my province: Rizhao, to visit a friend's family in a farming village; Liaocheng, to celebrate Thanksgiving with other foreign teachers; Zibo, to visit another friend's mother in an urban community built around an oil company...
Now that I'm on a seven-week break for Spring Festival, it's still a bit hard to tell you exactly where in the world I am. Well, I can tell you where I am right this second--Lijiang, Yunnan, an ancient canal town with winding cobblestone roads--but I won't be here in the morning. In the morning, I'm catching a flight to Xishuangbanna, the Thailand of China, where I hope to finally shed my many layers.
Here I am at the Carnation Inn in Lijiang, Yunnan with the Yu Family, whom I met while traveling to Shangri-la. The parents met and fell in love through their jobs. She's a TV host; he's a cameraman.
As I've traveled, I've found that though many of the places I've visited are what I've seen in travel magazines or heard about from fellow travelers, the breathtaking views are not what I keep thinking about. What has left the greatest impression is the people. These impressions have come from the old friends that I've visited, the new ones that I've made along the way and from the different ethnic and cultural minority groups that I've stayed with.
Over the next couple weeks, I hope to fill you in on some of these details and, of course, I'll include some of my favorite shots of those awesome views. The next time I write, I hope to be writing in a T-shirt rather than a sweater and a down jacket. See you then! |
| | Posted 2/4/2006 6:07 AM - 39 Views - 4 eProps - 2 comments
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