Everything becomes blurry when you travel for so many hours playing. Eventually, I got all the way to Hong Kong at about 2 AM to the Novotel city gate Hotel. Got up early in the morning mainly because I couldn’t sleep anyway and we are friends and stuff, and up with Paul and Kathryn at breakfast and had a wonderful meal with hundreds of things to choose from. But of course, there’s nothing like a bacon to make your day just about perfect. Then, we headed back to the airport and started our day journey of two more flights to Lijiang. Not too much drama there, just a lot of waiting around and doing very little other things.

As soon as you leave Hong Kong though and get into mainland China; in this case which was Kunming, you sure see that things are so different. Much less modern developments around, and yet that’s not quite accurate. It’s more like there are modern things visible and present, but they are dominated by many many many older and worn out things.

Anyway, we finally made it into Li Jiang ancient town. We are staying at that Hexie hotel and it is right on the square in the ancient town. Very touristy actually, but still very interesting. There are so many things for sale here did you just will not have seen anywhere else in the world. I picked up wool shawl for Bridget this is actually really nice. I hope she likes it. I spent a lot of time thinking about things that I purchased on these trips, and I really have not had a consistent theme except all of the textiles. But nothing to hang on the wall for each of my trips. That might have been a smart thing to have done, you think?

Last night we ate at a restaurant that had a guy working there could speak little English, so we ordered some things he suggested. Yes, now I remember about the food in China. Anything that you order fried? Comes in a pool of oil. Taste great as long as it’s really hot, but soon as the plate cools down it’s just so greasy.

Slept well last night on the rockhard beds that they have here, have the window open for some fresh air which was nice. Gotta get up shortly, Paul is an early riser and I said I would meet him for breakfast.