Liangshan Shangri-La Hotel Xichang

... to xichang...ha.
I sort of wanted to stay in Chengdu for the holiday so I could just be lazy and study and practice guitar...but I was committed to this trip and so I went. We got there and found a hotel. (We= Eric, Thibaut and myself) We started out to find a place for dinner and then suddenly I got that funny feeling in my belly (you know the kind that's like...hey better find a toliet and fast ...

... than 2,000 years is what the two aspire to protect. But in real life, both chose to compromise their ancient customs to make their modern lives easier. Erqing not only sees his wife and his two daughters almost every day but also takes them out occasionally. Duoji married his Mosuo girlfriend and acquired an official marriage certificate. Almost 15 years after the previously secluded tribe residing in the outlying areas of southwestern China ...

... dressed up like movie stars...others in blackened rags...basically extremes to the max! There is a large amount Yi people, an ethnic minority, who still dress in there traditional clothes here...really amazing colours with beautiful embroidery...even the clothes they wear just to work in the fields look amazing to me. We ambled down the market yesterday and got a lot of stares....I mean a serious amount! Some people here have never seen a white ...

... off to make a phonecall ..............2 minutes later he returned and asked us if we would care to go back to his family home for dinner that night............never one to refuse free food.................we accepted...............To cut a long story short .....were given the biggest best meal yet to be had in china .............this fella, his friend , his parents Me Jen and Adi ate a ton of great nosh cooked up by his mum......and it was a great experience to hang out ...

... families shooting off loads of fireworks. How is that different from normal? Well as I was watching a movie with Scott (Fight Club in case you were wondering) they were being shot from the garden underneath us. It was ridiculous. The closest I've been. And these fireworks were really good ones, not just noise. They were pretty but I kept thinking that these are just normal people who could have set them up wrong and one could come flying into my house. But yes ...

... Xichang, a city in Sichuan that has a bus to the more remote Lugu Lake. Lugu Lake is something that I read about in a book back home with one of the last matriarchal societies in the world (the last one in China). We wanted to spend a couple of days there and then head to Lijiang and tackle Tiger Leaping Gorge. So on New Years Eve, I packed a weeks worth of socks, some tights, a couple of long sleeve shirts and clean sweat pants and headed toward to the train station ...

... Mosuo household is an extended matrilineal family, all of whose members are related to each other on the mother's side, headed by a grandmother. Fathers have little to do with the children, if anything. The women are the property owners and decision-makers, while the men labour in the background. On checking into a lodge by the lake, I had to negotiate the rate with the eldest daughter of the grandmother, not the man standing behind her, who turned out to be her brother and ...

Maybe it is earthquake season, but another quake hit Sichuan, this time near Panzhihua, on the border with Yunnan. It was apparently felt in Lijiang, though I didn't feel anything. The death toll is so far 28, and rising. Though it won't match the quake in May which left around 80,000 dead. This is China Daily's story: PANZHIHUA -- Three more deaths were reported Sunday in Huili county, Sichuan Province, bringing the death toll of Saturday's 6.1-magnitude ...

... for a hotel and they said 'Follow us'. After checking in they asked if I wanted to join them for dinner. They were celebrating as two of them had just gotten married. One of the guys, Hippo, is from this town so he led the way. We took the bus to a park next to a nice lake surrounded by mountains. From there we climbed into a rowboat and sat back while a 52 year old, stout fella rowed us 20 minutes across the lake. Dinner was waiting which ...

... sections of the Hui Muslim quarter in Kunming). Do they move to other parts of the city? Is there some sort of gentrification, where the middle classes move into the new highrises that are put up, and the displaced move into the homes left behind? There isn't a lot of visible displacement, at least not in the way of homelessness--there must be some mechanism for the massive amount of displacement, but I have no idea what that might be. The economic life of the ...