So the excursion organized by our program this semester was to the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region—
okay quick and hopefully not too confusing lesson about China and its autonomous regions:
China has 34 administrative divisions, 22 of which are provinces and 5 are autonomous regions (the other divisions are the 4 municipalities, 2 special administrative regions, and Taiwan, but since you have access to Google and I have to make do with Bing, I think you can look those up yourself). China is also home to 56 ethnic groups, with 91.59% of the population belonging to the (according to Wikipedia), which leaves less than 10% of the population to fill up the other 55 ethnic groups. Now, tying this all back together with the autonomous regions, in order to become a governor of an autonomous region, you must be of a relevant ethnic minority. For example, in order to be governor of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, you would have to be of the Zhuang minority. That’s pretty much the only difference between the autonomous regions and regular provinces.
Oookay, my surprise Chinese history lesson is complete for now—
Anyway, it was a very cool trip, we visited the “rice terraces” of Ping’An, the Li River in Yangshuo County, and the street and night markets in Guilin, not to mention the Reed Flute Cave, Camel Rock, and we held monkeys and peacocks! While we were still very much jetlagged and the whole trip involved just ridiculous amounts of walking, it was all still very enchanting.
These are some pictures of the Longji Rice Terraces (Longji means dragon’s back). We were in Ping’An which is super close to Guilin, the big city we went to in Guangxi. Again, Google is your friend. I really enjoyed seeing the rice terraces; they were beautiful but also not like anything we really have in America (*as far as I know) and it was amazing to be able to climb them and take these pics—which really don’t do the place justice. Of course, Claudia and I had the brilliant idea to try and climb onto one of the rice terraces. And we made it, I’ll have you know. Our shoes, however…were not so lucky.
After leaving the Longji Rice Terraces (we stayed there for 1 night and 1 day), we stayed a night in Guilin, which had a very cool street and night market. We did a little tourist-ing and a little shopping, fed some fish, held some Peacocks.. After our stay in Guilin we took a boat down the Li River—which is famous for being the place on the back of the Chinese 20 yuan (the currency here)—and we saw many land marks that line the river, such as the “9 Painted Horses Hill” and the “Five Finger Mountain.” We took the Li River to Yangshuo County, where it rained almost the entire time we were there, though it cleared up enough for us to visit the Camel Rock, Moon Hill, and Banyan Tree (where we held monkeys!). We looked at the shops there for a little bit and the next day we visited the Reed Flute Cave, which was lit up with all sorts of colorful lights and fun names for the rock formations. We ended the trip with another four-hour trip back to Beijing so that we could be ready for school to start the next week.
Seriously look at how cool these monkeys are ^^^
Hopefully more posts with pics to come.
~Courtney