LiJiang

So we finally decided to travel to places close to Kunming. We took Mom and Kurt to LiJiang, about a 40 minute plane ride from our home. It was absolutely beautiful. After much debating about a hotel, I was going for a place about $7/night, Kurt found one for $40/night, we settled on Kurt's, since it was only one night. What a great choice. It was a four star hotel, and it was absolutely gorgeous, with a water wheel and wishing well included. The first day we roamed around the town and did a lot of shopping. We ate lunch at a Sichuan restaurant next to our hotel while mom shopped and ate all at the same time. The food was really good and the scenery was just awesome. After shopping we headed back to the hotel to play some 500 and rest up before our dinner. One of my students at Web owns a restaurant in LiJiang, so we decided to meet up with her for dinner that night. She promised to give us a taste of LiJiang. Oh man, it was so good, we had hot pot, and the famous cakes-salty and sweet- and were stuffed to the brim. After dinner we walked around the old town taking pictures of lights and we bought a candle to send down the river for good luck. After that, we headed back to the hotel for a fire party- which Kurt thought was a firework show- and did some dancing around a BBQ with some of the locals. It was good fun. Then we headed to bed to get some good sleep. The next morning, we thought about going to snow mountain until we realized that it was 160RMB just to walk in, so we ix nayed that idea and decided to take our own hike. We hiked up a bit and took some pictures and then realized that we still didn't want to pay money to walk on a road. We headed down to KFC for a quick power snack-fries, coke, and chicken wings- and then took to the streets of the old town again. We decided to stop for some lunch at this restaurant called Le Petit Paris. 2 hours later, after many games of Big 2, 2 pizzas, 2 sandwiches, 2 salads, fried bananas, and coffee, we decided to head back to the hotel to hang around. Kurt was starting to get a little sick, so we thought we'd rest up a bit. Grabbed some dumplings and potatoes from the street, and headed to the airport. Whew, what a trip!
Pics of our awesome hotel!!
We played 500 and Big 2 outside in this little area, it was awesome!
At the Sichuan restaurant.
Streets of old town
Big square in old town with the water wheels and requests to the gods.
Jeff's artistic pics
Candle ceremony
Nightlife of the old town

We had some xiao cao for a late night snack
Getting my own water from the well
Snow mountain