The Prodigal Son Returns

I have to apologize for vanishing this last week and half. I was in Yunnan (Southwestern China) for about 10 days and spent the vast majority of that time without internet access (hiking or crying because the Berry's didn't pay their bill on time). I have more stories than I could possibly tell in one entry, so my next few entries will probably all be about my trip.

This trip to Yunnan started as many of my trips in China start - the Shanghai Railway Station. Despite my somewhat hellish journey via hard seat to Harbin last month, I had decided to book a 38-hour hard seat down to Kunming (in a desperate effort to save money now that I'm no longer working and studying instead). The journey went about as well as could be expected. There were no dead people, no huge riots, no police crackdowns - just a lot of Chinese people eating oranges, sunflower seeds, and fangbianmian and very, very little sleep. I was also able to read one book from start to finish and get halfway through another one before the trip was over. 38 hours is a lot of time to be in one place without a computer... Oh, I also discovered the joys of books on tape. I listened to a couple of Sherlock Holmes books on tape that I had downloaded and also listened to Jack Welch's self-narrated autobiography. Good stuff!

Anyways, I arrived in Kunming fairly exhausted but happy. Kunming was about 25 degrees warmer than Shanghai and it was amazingly refreshing just to step out into the sun. I had no idea how much I liked the sun... I trucked over to the Berry's place where I met up with Sam, Jono, and Gareth. We relaxed for most of the day and finished up some of the final details for the hat tournament. I was also taught how to salt cure meat and have started doing so in Shanghai!

The next two days we played in a pretty sweet 4-team hat tournament. My team (team 2) was somewhat appropriately named SpongeBeardBoobPants. I think that 5 out of 8 guys on our team had significant facial hair. I won't get into the details of the tournament except to say that we had blast and ended up winning the whole thing. I know it sounds cliche, but what really made this hat tournament special was how much all of the new players learned. It was really great to see how much they all developed over just one weekend (I even taught them MILK.) Ok, more details will follow on tournament parties and other travels, but that's it for now.

- Jon