back!!!

Yes, I'm back. Technically, I got back early yesterday morning (1 a.m.) but I was too tired last night to post. Sorry about that.

I had an amazing time in Yunnan. In Lijiang, Debbie (the 4th grade teacher at my school), her husband, Tom, Mom and I stayed in a hotel that was actually a bunch of rooms looking onto a courtyard. It was spectacular, and very clean, and right up a small hill from the shopping district in the old town. We all decided to spend the first day shopping since we wanted to get acclimated to the altitude. Lijiang is 1830 meters (6000 feet) above sea level; Ningbo is right at sea level, so we were all worried about altitude sickness. And rightly so, too. That afternoon I felt HORRIBLE, went back to the hotel for a nap and ended up sleeping for 2 1/2 hours. Thankfully, the next morning I felt much better.

I bought plenty of stuff while we were there: 4 pairs of earrings, 3 skirts, 2 scrumptious raspberry yoghurt smoothies....

As far as I could tell, there wasn't really anything to see besides the old city, so I won't talk about that without photos. I'll post some as soon as I can get home and upload them though.

Going to Beijing was a bit of a pain. Because of some strange thing with my plane ticket, I flew from Dali (I only spent an afternoon there) to Kunming, spent over seven hours in the airport there writing in my journal, then flew from there to Beijing in the evening. I found out that there are only two flights from Dali to Kunming, one at 8:30 a.m. and one at 8:35 a.m.

Retreat was fantabulous. It was great seeing everyone. I would go on and on about retreat if I could, but...

And everybody there is made of awesome :P