okay, okay, i'm shitty at this. i was really hateful on certain people who failed to update their blogs at all while travelling, and now i'm doing the same thing. in my defense, its hard to get to a computer on the road, and when you do, you're too tired to think about writing a whole blog entry. well, i'm paying for that now. so where did i leave off? i'm too lazy to check, so i'll say that it was right after i saw spiderman 3 in chinese, which i was very proud to understand most of. from there, we travelled for a day and a half south to get to laos, where we spent a lovely afternoon. i wasn't really in favor of taking this excursion, which was a lot of hassle for only a small payoff, but it was cool to see laos, which is amazingly beautiful. and which, surprisingly, looked very different from the chinese farmland right across the border. i didn't think it would, but all of a sudden, as we passed through the border (which is extremely easy to do, you can get a visa there, although the officials gypped us our our change), it was clear we were in a different place. it was nice, kind of hot, we rode bikes through a bunch of farms to get to the big sight of the town luang namtha, a waterfall, and were profoundly disappointed. but the ride made it worth while. um, so then we headed back, spent another day in jinghong, the capital of xishuangbanna, and then flew to dali. when we got to dali, which is an incredibly cute town, we were greeted with rain showers that continued for two days, at which point we checked the internet and discovered that they would last for another five. this was quite a duller on our plan to spend the next 10 days travelling north to zhongdian through lijiang and tiger leaping gorge. actually, zhongdian has been renamed shangri-la as china's attempt to cash in on the legend, and chinese people actually all call it "shan ga li la." so thinking quickly, we decided to reroute our plans to head to chengdu, and check out some of the sights there. we took a bus back to kunming, then took an overnight train to chengdu. after an afternoon spent walking around the city, we booked our spots in a chinese tour to jiuzhaigou, a nature reserve famed for the aqua-colored water in its lakes. the chinese tour was a hoot, filled with old grandmas who took care of us like they were our own, and 6 or 7 stops at stores where we were urged to buy everything from chinese medicine to items made from yak's horns. jiuzhaigou was pretty cool, although it had, like most nature sites in china, a staircase leading through the whole place, through which you trudged in line with hundreds of chinese people, sort of like waiting on line in disneyworld.
so the big thing that happened was that, after 15 days of travelling, dandan and i finally totally totally lost our cool at each other, and today we have split ways. to me it seemed sort of inevitable, i was super nervous at the thought of travelling for a month with someone, when i've never really travelled for more than 10 days at all, and i know i'm not an easy person to travel with. when i saw that things were starting to fall apart, i made my own plans for tibet, which i was able to do because dandan told me that she was rethinking making the trip because she was really worried about altitude and because she didn't want to spend so much money because she just bought a macbook. since i was thinking i'd have to cancel that part of the trip anyway because making your way through tibet with someone you're hardly talking to is not my idea of a good time, i was glad to find that a friend from abroad was planning a trip there at the same time. i do feel really bad about the way that things turned out, but at the same time i think the only way not to go crazy when you're travelling with someone for a long time is to reserve the right to separate if you need to. also, i've learned a ton about the differences between chinese and americans, and maybe i've gotten a clue as to why no one else i know has ever travelled with a chinese person. the biggest problem, i guess, is that they get very very offended at things, things that for me are just part of the give and take of travelling. although today dandan told me that when i said "it sucks to be you" our friendship was over forever, i'm hoping that after a month or so she'll have chilled out a bit about it. i thought it was a pretty impressive fight too, with moments like dandan exclaiming, "here's your 'freedom'!" as she slammed the window shades shut. i dunno, after almost a month of travelling, its hard to take these things seriously. not so for her. well dandan, wherever you are out there, i hope you're having a good time.