Zack and Elizabeth: 三峽河巡航 - Three Gorges river cruise

Last week we had the whole week off from school for Chinese National Day...the Chinese are really patriotic. Five of our [American] friends visited from another city for the whole week. It was awesome. We showed them our city for a few days, and we also spend a few days going on a river "cruise" through the Three Gorges. Thinking back, I wish I could have taken a picture of our rooms to post here...oh well, hindsight. Anyway, we had two rooms for eight people each with two bunkbeds with mattresses as pillowy soft as concrete. But, pictures are worth a thousand words or something, so here we go.............

This is Zack and our friend David with a bunch of Chinese guys who randomly came up to talk to us to practice their English in the central square of our city.

We love taking pictures of the ridiculous English phrases in our town, and this is one of the most obviously strange.

This is a coffee shop in our town which so obviously ripped off its logo from Starbucks.

Walking down a lot of stairs to board our boat.

These little girls were really excited to practice their English with us on the boat.

I like taking pictures of bridges.

A big bridge near the Three Gorges Dam

We spent a lot of time playing cards on the boat

David and Katie high-fiving

Some people fishing with an awesome enormous net in the Three Gorges

I took this picture to show how big the gorges are...that little dot at the bottom of the gorge is a big cruise boat.

Craig and Jessica, two friends from the other city

There were a lot of caves along the three gorges and this one had stairs leading up to it...which we are very curious about.

This is some famous landmark along the Three Gorges on the Yangtze River

Zack is really proud of this picture. The landmark is on the back of the 10 yuan bill.

Us in front of the landmark thingy

Again, I like taking pictures of bridges

Cute little kids who were really excited to scream at us (especially the little boy with the split pants) as we walked by.

A Buddhist temple...the gold bin thingy is where you put the incense you burn.

Before we came to China, we thought every building looked like this...unfortunately, we were wrong.

Another bridge...

This is a pond at the monastery of the White Emporer. According to legend, a man was standing in front of this pool when a magical white smoke rose from the pond and became a dragon, so the man proclaimed himself the White Dragon Emporer...or something.

Bones of monks (I think) inside a display case. A lot of people stuffed money inside for some reason we don't understand.

This is an example of the enormous amount of stairs we were forced to climb on our cruise. We tried to make an accurate guess about how many stairs we climbed in the three days and we came up with between 1000 and 1500. Exhaustion.