I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but I am here on this trip with my mom. We are meeting up with some family later in Shanghai then in Hong Kong (which will be our next stop!). Currently we are on day 3 of the Shanghai portion but now I realized we are not even in Shanghai anymore. We joined a tour for this and I always thought we'd spend the whole tour in Shanghai, but it turns out we are also driving a lot and visiting several cities a few hours away from there. Tomorrow we go to Huangshan which I'm soooo excited about!! I was most looking forward to it.
At the moment I'm not even sure which city we're in. Just looked on my GPS - I am currently in "Chun'an". I actually don't know many places in China besides the larger cities so all the other places we've been visiting so far..I've never even heard of until now. They've all been really interesting though and I'm having a really great time so far. I always knew China was huge but now I realize even in all the smaller random cities (that are not extremely touristic yet), there's so much to see and they're all so busy. For my next China trip I really want to see some pandas!! & I really want to go to Xi'an as well.
Today we visited a tea plantation and an island on Qiandao Lake (which I think is translated to something like the island of good luck). I may have made an impulsive purchase at the tea plantation. But it was the best green tea I've ever had and extremely fresh. I drink green tea a lot and I've never been able to find green tea of this quality in Toronto. The tea leaves are actually whole and smell really nice. & they are freshly picked. I got 1200RMB/~ $235 cdn worth which was 500g (plus they threw in a few free small tins for me). My mom got some as well. I'm pretty sure we have enough green tea now for at least a year or two..of drinking it everyday..lol.
This was one of the islands on Qiandao Lake. I really enjoyed it here. We took a ~20min boat ride over. Took a ton of photos along the way. On the island there were peacocks and also monkeys who put on a performance for us. We didn't explore all of it but I think there were also buddhist temples. The monkeys were my favourite part. I am not in support of using animals like that for entertainment though. I hope this is not one of the places where they get trained with abuse. They were so cute. I don't think I've ever seen monkeys before (except in a zoo)..I only just realized just how human-like they really are. The baby was adorable - it kept jumping around and playing with the ropes. I can't wait to visit the monkey island in Hong Kong too heheh
Today for lunch I accidentally swallowed a tiny fish bone. I kept drinking and swallowing mouthfuls of rice without chewing, trying to get it down but it wouldn't move. I imagined a worst case scenario where I may have had to get surgery to remove it or something lol. It was stuck in my throat all day until dinner when I was finally able to wash it down. So painful! It felt like a knife in my throat. Never going to eat fish again.
Time to sleep now. Got a whole 6 hours of sleep ahead of me! By the way I'm probably only going to post 5 photos per day on these daily updates. When I get back to Toronto and have more time, I'll edit the rest of the photos and post them up slowly with more in-depth posts.
I'm a bit scared of monkeys to be honest; almost got attacked by one once. Never say never; the fish bone experience was certainly an exception.
ReplyDeleteYea they are quite aggressive I've seen lol but so cute :p
DeleteI don't really like fish anyway! I only eat salmon usually