Today wasn’t an all too exciting day. It was mainly driving and more driving, but the good thing for some of the adults is that we’ve gone from the mountains to level ground. So let me start from the morning. Okay, well we woke up, went to breakfast, and then got on the bus and took a ride down the mountain, leaving Jiuzhaigou, and heading towards Mianyang (still in Sichuan). I didn’t sleep very much on the bus, maybe only an hour or two, so I spent most of the time enjoying the view, listening to CDs, and listening to our guide talk about stuff such as the scenery, his life story, experiences, etc. Some stuff to note during our bus ride is that we stopped at a toilet about 4500m above sea level. This toilet was rather…shall I say…simple (just a hole in the ground with no door >_<), thankfully I didn’t have to (probably also didn’t want to) use the bathroom. Another interesting happening was that we ended up being stuck in a little predicament where they were fixing the road while people were driving over it. Of course this caused the problem that we had to wait for concrete to dry. Eventually we got through, somehow…I have no idea, and the ride from then on was without any real problems. We made only two non-bathroom stops; one for lunch, and one for a tourist spot. Lunch was okay, not very exciting, but afterwards we went next door to this crystal store where the moms bought a lot of stuff. Beforehand, the guide told us that if we could bargain down to half price than that was excellent…who knew that Mao Ah Yi would bargain something from 380 to 80 and another thing from like 980 to 280 (I think…not too sure about the latter)! I felt so bad for the vendor girl. Our second non-bathroom stop was to a memorial place for the Tang dynasty poet, Bai Li (Li Bai). Inside there was like stuff about his life, and his poems and all that fun stuff, most of which I did not understand, but then again, there’s a lot of things on this trip that I don’t understand (meaning my parents are getting smarter because they understand Chinese well, whereas I’m just learning that people smoke and the mountains are really pretty =P). Oh well, an hour later (at around 6 pm…we woke up at 6 am) we got to Mianyang (the second biggest city in Sichuan province) and arrived at our hotel (Fule International Hotel…what the hey is an “international” hotel?…four stars…four stars). The buildings are detached meaning that us in building 5, room 5104, have to walk…shock…outside…double shock…to the lobby or the dining area.

At night the moms shopped more at the hotel store (and bought cheaper crystal…fake, real, don’t know). Then, at around 9, our local guide told us about Du Jiang Yan and the reasoning behind how it was built and why the splitting of the two rivers became successful and has still worked for 2000 some years. It was really interesting, but I’m not going to explain it to you guys. Wow, short entry. I’m going to try and call people (that is if I don’t fall asleep watching TV first), and see what’s going on back home. I want to be able to call people at the reunion, but it’s probably not going to happen because I can’t call a cell phone using the IP phone cards…sigh…oh well. Good night.