Beginning of Spring Break (April 3rd)

The pictures from my spring break are on another website. Since I didn't have enough room to keep all the pictures on my camera, I had to use Jeremy's computer to upload my pictures. He then put them on the internet. So, if you want to see the pictures (which you do since they are BREATHTAKING), just go to http://picasaweb.google.com/mr.walker.tkd23 to see my pictures and go to http://picasaweb.google.com/mr.walker.tkd6 and http://picasaweb.google.com/mr.walker.tkd7 to see Jeremy's pictures, which include beautiful panoramas that my camera can't take.

My spring break started on April 3rd. Jeremy, Marit, Bjoernar and I decided that we would go to Guilin and Yangshuo, which is in the southeast part of China near Hong Kong, from April 3rd to April 12th. I went to Chinese class in the morning, returned home and then went to my last cooking class where we were to have our final. Our final consisted of making two dishes, fried tomato and scrambled eggs and tudousi (very thin french fries with green pepper), on our own. We (the students) still collaborated with one another on how to cook the dishes. Brian and I worked together and I did fairly well. My teacher said that my scrambled eggs and tomato were good, but that my tudousi was too bland. After our last cooking class, I returned home, surfed the internet, and ate dinner with Jeremy and Erik at the "rice place" right around the corner. Marit, Jeremy, Bjoernar and I left for the airport around 7 p.m. and waited there for an hour and a half for our plane to depart. The four of us didn't have seats next to each other, so I did some homework and tried to sleep. The flight only took about an hour an a half or so, but the landing was very weird and shaky. As we were waiting for Bjoernar's and Marit's luggage (Jeremy and I had taken our backpacks on the plane), Jeremy went to find out what the best way would be to get to our hostel. We took a 20 RMB bus from the airport to downtown Guilin. We didn't know exactly where our hostel was so we asked a taxi driver to take us there. It turned out we were only about five minutes away from the hostel, which was located in the sketchy back alleys of Guilin. The hostel itself, however, was very nice. We checked into a room with four beds, dropped our stuff off, took showers and went to sleep around 1 or 2 in the morning.