I've got a metric fuck ton of catching up to do, but it's all I'm doing for the next couple of days. I'll look again at where I'm at on Monday and see if it's actually doable.



5598 / 50000 words. 11% done!

3:41 pm


6800 / 50000 words. 14% done!
I think I'm going to go for a walk :)

8:48 pm


11675 / 50000 words. 23% done!

This is one of my kids from last year. He was one of the ones that started out completely apathetic but made it through (by the skin of his teeth). He won a contest with this and will be flown to New York to meet Def Jam's executive Russell Simmons and perform his winning song live on BET. They got his age wrong though - or he was the youngest ( Read more... )

I've backdated again, and separated things so you can just click on whichever you might want to read and not have to load everything.

Thirty Hours on a Train

Sim's Cozy Garden Hostel

Pandas!

The Long Walk & Adventures at Pizza Hut

Wenshu Monastery

Getting from Chengdu to Xi'anThis round of updates ends at a not so great point (I was getting ( Read more... )

I've backdated this so it's closer to the actual time we were there, so here's a link :)

(Unlike my catch-up posts, this one was written at the time ( Read more... )

  The day after the Long Walk, we headed off to the Wenshu Monastery.  Which was thankfully only a short walk from the hostel.  It was quiet (a welcome miracle) and peaceful.  We wandered through the outside gardens which had plenty of ponds and plenty of turtles, spent some time enjoying the various touches outside the buildings, and took some ( Read more... )

   Rob had the idea that to help us prepare for Hau Shan we should take a long walk.  Several hours long.  I agreed and the next morning we set out reasonably early for the Green Ram Temple.  That was the destination we picked as our turn around point.  Getting there was a long walk, but not really a problem since all we had to do really was follow ( Read more... )

The whole reason for coming to Chengdu was the Panda Breeding Facility outside of town.  It’s one of the largest in the world, if not *the* largest, and it houses both Giant Pandas and their Red Panda cousins.  Rob Loves Pandas.  We set up to go on the tour with a group from Sim’s, and then split off and wandered on our own for our time there.  We ( Read more... )

The good thing about our stay in Chengdu was the hostel.  We stayed at Sim’s cozy Garden Hostel and everything about it was good, excellent in comparison to some that we stayed at in other places.  The courtyard garden even had bunnies ;p  The biggest thing for me here was that the restaurant/bar in the hostel had a very good array of western and ( Read more... )

The updates I intended to post while in Xi'An will be delayed. The net at our hostel only actually functions on their computers and I won't sit in the lobby to compose them (or pay for internet that supposedly comes with the room for that long). But I haven't forgotten and I'll try again when we're in Lanzhou in a few days ( Read more... )