I overslept again…sigh. I thought wake-up was at 7, but it was at 6. Anyways, it was another day in Jiuzhaigou (which means Nine Village Valley because there are nine Tibetan villages along the river valley). The weather was nicer today temperature wise, but other than that…it sucked. It rained all morning, meaning that the roads were wet and all the paths were slippery…but I’ll get to complaining about that later. Okay, so when we got to the place, we had to wait a long time because the guide had to buy re-entry tickets for us. Therefore we spent maybe 30 minutes inside the visitor’s center. It was pretty interesting with a topographic map of the area, clothing and accessories of the local people, plants and animals found in the area, etc. Once the tickets were bought, we had to go into the ticketing area and get our pictures taken…weird. Well it turns out is that they take the picture and put it on your ticket so random people can’t like cheat their way in or something (I don’t really get it…it’s just like some kind of ID). As the day progressed, the rain got harder and harder so I went from wearing a jacket to holding an umbrella, to wearing a poncho (while still doing the previous two). Our first stop was Arrow Bamboo Lake and then the Pearl Shoal Lake thing and Waterfall. It was really beautiful with all the bubbling water seeming like pearls, and then the water falling down the waterfall was like white silk. The weather was really nice there because of the light wind and the trees blocked most of the rain. However, as we walked towards the exit (which was the road…meaning lots of traffic) the rain started getting harder and the roads were filled with pools of mud…bleh. Okay, so here’s where I’m going to complain. The smart thing would have been to wear like warm-ups or something (like I did yesterday), but instead, I decided to wear jeans…sigh. Anyways, so as we walked down the road, buses and stuff passed by frequently while we walked on gravel, the road, all pretty nasty with the rain. Every time a bus passed by, I was thinking to myself, please don’t splash, please don’t splash. Then, this one bus comes by and as it’s coming by, I can see it’s splashing streams of water to the side of the road, so I get as far to the side as I can and start hoping again that their won’t be anything to splash where I’m standin, but guess what…it happened, now I have all these dots of mud on the side of my nice Nautica carpenter jeans…sniff. From then on (during our walk down the road), whenever a bus passed by, I ducked into a fetal position and used my umbrella to cover my entire body. Another thing that sucks is that my fairly new shoes are all muddy and the cloth part has a bunch of little brown dots on it. Aiye…well our next stop was lunch. Lunch was fun. Since it was raining, the whole floor inside the restaurant was wet so I like hydroplaned my way to the table =P.

In the afternoon, we had to take a bus from the restaurant to our next stop, Panda Lake. However, what should have been maybe like a 10 minute ride ended up being a 30 minute ride because like two buses broke down side by side (something like that). Therefore, most of us took this opportunity to sleep. When we got to Panda Lake, the lake was nice and all, but what was really cool was all the fish. These fish were so funny because they all swam along the bank because they were waiting for food to be thrown at them, and when it did (or when one fish went after some piece of wood that looked like food), all these fish would swarm towards it and they would seriously fight for it. We even saw fish being pushed out of the water, on to the bank! Oh yeah, by this time the rain stopped completely, so there was no more mud splashing.

Our next stop was Five Color Lake (the other one was a pond). I don’t think that this one was as pretty as the Pond, but it was still pretty nice, I guess. One cool thing is that in the middle of the lake, there is this fallen tree in the water, but it’s shape looks like a crocodile (it really does). Also, above the lake on the mountain, there’s this rock which looks like there’s a peacock engraved in it. This is why the lake is also called Peacock Lake. Oh, on our way back to the road, there were all these signs along the path saying “Please don’t step off the platform…Protect nature…etc.” But of course, in typical Chinese fashion, there were a bunch of people sitting in the grass chilling, relaxing, having a picnic =P. Our next stop was the shop place where all the moms bought a bunch of (probably fake…but whatever) Tibetan stone bracelet things. After that, we went and saw another waterfall and finally went back to the entrance and then the hotel, where, after dinner, I washed my shoes with a toothbrush (and they’re still not clean enough for my liking), but the people in the hotel refused to wash my jeans…sigh. Now I’ll have to carry around muddy jeans for the rest of the trip, AND I can’t wear them again for the rest of the trip =(. Dah well, me and my dumb luck. Hopefully I don’t oversleep again.

(This is a note after I finished my entry) Okay, well just now all of a sudden we heard some key trying to open our door right, and Eric and I got a little freaked out. Therefore, I walked to the door and looked through the peephole and saw this girl trying to open our door, so I opened the door (cautiously) and the girl goes…

Girl: “Eh? Zhe me yo ren? Wo men ye shi 103!”
Me: “Shi bu shi cuo lou?”
Girl: “Aiyo! Aiyo! Cuo lou le! Wo men shi er lou! (to her friends) Bie kai le, cuo lou, cuo lou!”
=P