I‘ve been on holiday since Monday, January 21. Life is a bit different on holiday. More time to read? Maybe. More time to study Chinese? Not really. More time to wonder where the time went? Yes!

We’ve had some bad weather in China this past week. Turns out Spring Festival this year is going to be even more like Christmas in the U.S. …you know with all the worry about delays, changed plans, and closed roads, stations and airports

But before the bad weather hit, I did make a trip to Guilin. Rosely who was with me for a month and a half in Ankang in 2006 is now a tour guide in Guilin. She was showing some friends the sights in Guilin and I joined them for an afternoon. After they met me at the bus station, we headed across this walking street toward that hill in the background. The land around that hill is now a college and a park but once was the home of royal princes, the site of the “imperial testing house,” and the location of Dr. Sun Yat Sen’s headquarters for the North Expedition.

We looked at the fortune well, the couple tree, the outside of the earlier palace which is now an administrative building, and then climbed these stairs on Solitary Beauty Peak. Here Rosely is with her college English classmate and his childhood friend. I’m looking up these stairs wondering if they could be any steeper and why I am going to climb them. But the climb was really nothing compared to the climb at HuaShan in 2006!

Next we went to Seven Star Park. I was most interested in the cave there. Not because I’m that interested in caves but because I’d just heard there are people who come to the Guilin/Yangshuo area to explore caves. Apparently there are many uncharted caves and there are quite a group of foreigners who want to explore them. They spend weeks and sometimes months down in the caves, making maps and spelunking (Yes, I know that word.) So I went into the Seven Star Park’s charted cave with renewed interest, and came out with the renewed conviction that I will not be spending one night in a cave. However, I was surprised at how warm the temperature inside the cave was. It was much warmer than the outside temperature. A spelunker has since told me the temperature inside a cave is always the average of the annual temperature outside the cave. So caves in this area are always 20C/78F. The temperature in Guilin that day was 7C/44F. No wonder we braced ourselves as we prepared to step out into the real world again.

The trip to Guilin was during the first week of my holiday. The next week we had a day without power. That night we heard that many parts in China were experiencing heavy ice and snow storms. So the next morning some of us decided to climb to the TV tower in Yangshuo. The top of the karsts is where the ice in Yangshuo has been. We wanted to see it. It’s a 45 minute climb to the TV tower. The view on the climb is instructive. You get a much better perspective on the location of places. That blue roof and the white roof to it’s right are the covered market where fresh meat, vegetables, and so many other food stuffs are sold daily. The green area just beyond the market and including the karst with the pagoda is Yangshuo Park. And look at how the buildings nestle around the karst.

Near the top we did see the ice. Just on the plants. Not on the path. It was a heavily laden branch bent over the path that final caused us to turn back.

That was earlier this week. The rest of the week we spent feeling lucky that we only lost power occasionally and only for brief periods of time. We heard from other people in other provinces of water and power outages and being stranded by snow and ice. But we only had rain and colder than normal temperatures. We stayed close to our heaters reading and dining.

That is until yesterday when we did venture out to Shelly’s place on the river. She has started a new adventure. It’s called The Li Riverside Hotel. She showed us the rooms. Spacious. Big windows with views. And bathtubs! She served us a huge lunch in thanks to Laurie who has started taking a volunteer to her school where she trains young people to work in the tourist industry. These are young people who did not pass the high school entrance exam. In the picture are Laurie, Shelly, Michelle, Betts, me and Kelly.

It hasn’t rained all day. It’s nearly 4 o’clock. It’s February 1st. And yes, I’m wondering where all the time goes.