Guilin/Yangshuo

As promised, here's the post about our trip to Guilin and Yangshuo with my Mom. I'd heard the area was beautiful and it didn't disappoint. It was so nice to get out of Beijing's dry, polluted air and be somewhere green and rural.

Some highlights and lowlights (dog meat):

~ Fields full of yellow canola flowers. This is a huge deal here and people were stopping everywhere to take pictures of them. It reminded me of the Netherlands when we'd go during tulip time. Funny thing is that our guide kept making such a big deal about them (and the fields were gorgeous), but these fields literally surrounded us in Germany and they were the bane of my existence there. I've never had such bad allergies in my life as when they were releasing their pollen.

~ Karsts - the area is littered with this beautiful topography (the hills/mountains in most of the pictures). I had no idea what a karst was until we moved here and went to Vietnam.

~ Visiting a farm house where 12 generations have lived over the past 300 years.

~ The farmer's market in Fuli which was both interesting for the fruits, vegetables, eggs, poultry we saw for sale, and seeing the food stands selling different dishes featuring dog meat. I literally saw the hind quarters of dog carved up and it's in the picture of the market on the slideshow, but hard to see. It's on the white freezer behind the woman with a teal coat and blue apron.

~ Watching the water buffalo at work in the fields

~ Going cormorant fishing on the Li River. From Wikipedia: Cormorant fishing is a traditional fishing method in which fishermen use trained cormorants to fish in rivers. Historically, cormorant fishing has taken place in Japan and China from around 960 AD.^[1] and recorded from other places throughout the world.

To control the birds, the fishermen tie a snare near the base of the bird's throat. This prevents the birds from swallowing larger fish, which are held in their throat, but the birds can swallow smaller fish. When a cormorant has caught a fish in its throat, the fisherman brings the bird back to the boat and has the bird spit the fish up. Though cormorant fishing once was a successful industry, its primary use today is to serve the tourism industry.

It's a long slideshow. I was snapping pictures of the gorgeous countryside the whole time, but I tried to spare you having to wade through too many. I had a hard time getting the captions to show up, so they are a mix of all different colors and in different spots on the pictures. The playback is also kind of slow, so you can click through faster at the bottom, right corner. There is one random one thrown in at the end where I took Mom to a restaurant featuring duck, which is famous here. I still haven't found a duck dish that I like - yuck.

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