Some of this may be repetition from Steve's post, but I wanted to add my own comments here.

Digital photography is an interesting thing. We were standing outside the market and I was aware that that everyone coming and going on bicycle carts was different than it was at home, but it didn't really strike me as "exotic" until I looked at the display in my camera (chimping as Steve calls it).

But when we entered the market and saw all the plastic bowls of eels, frogs, snails, and unrecognizable squirming things, then I really knew I wasn't at the farmer's market at home.

Some of the food was ready to eat,

but mostly the market was filled with people shopping for what they were going to cook that day, which was what we supposed to be there to do. (Actually, they had done the shopping for us already, we were just shown everything we would be using in our class). What was great about this, is that I frequently go to 99 Ranch or Marina Foods at home and have no idea what many of the produce items are, so I took the opportunity to ask lots of questions about what things are while Steve focused on taking pictures ( you can see his blue jacket in the middle of all this):

Then we went to a small village where the cooking school was located.

The first item we prepared was steamed chicken:

The complete menu was:

• egg wrapped dumplings
• steamed chicken with mushroom
• eggplant with soy and oyster sauce
• stir fried pork with vegetables and oyster sauce
• green vegetables with garlic.

Today was going to be a nice, slow, layover day and it turned out to be sort of a resort high activity day. This whole area is sort of like a resort with all kinds of supervised activities. We started out going to cooking school which started out with a trip to the local market. I think for shock value as much as anything. And the market is sort of shocking – it is like a giant, very diverse, farmers market. The quality of the food looks great (although I am not much of a judge on what high quality dog meat looks like). Anything you can think of is for sale here (or, at least, anything I can think of).

From fresh water eels to eggplants,

chickens, rabbits, and doves.

Then it was off to a village out of town where we watch a demo

and cooked our own lunch 

and ate it outside with a view that is becoming normal.

After a breakfast of noodle soup and eggs for Michele and bacon and eggs for me, we spent the day bike riding in the country. This sounds easier and more idyllic than it was for me: the bike was too little and I hadn't counted on the special anal probe seat. We would ride down a narrow road thinking we were going to be in the boondocks, and come across some tourist facility.

Everywhere we go there are tourists – most of them Chinese. In Yangshuo, there are big, expensive looking hotels with BMW X5s and Mercedes in front, the handsomest store in town is a wedding arranger. It occurred to us that this has been a tourist destination for a thousand years – think of all the Chinese watercolors of this landscape. Years ago the local cormorant fisherman was fishing for a living, now he is putting on a show for tourist for a living (we think, what ever was happening was around the bend in the river).

The landscape here is staggering. It has the same quality as southeastern Utah; they don't look even remotely similar, but every turn in the road bring a new jaw dropping view.

As we rode through the countryside, the farm road turned into a trail

and then dead-ended at a river where we hired a ferry to get across.

And, shockingly enough, this river was full of tourists,

running the rapids, Chinese style.

After the river, we stopped for a late lunch of braised ginger pumpkin and chicken soup with a Li Quan beer. Then a short ride back to the guest house at Moon Hill where we could read about Bo, the Obama's new dog.    -S

Michele spent the morning working. That in itself amazes me. We are in China and Michele is working in California.

Then we moved to a small village near Yangshuo. (Where I am sitting, drinking a cappuccino, and typing this [hunt and peck method] while chickens are foraging [also hunt and peck method] in the front of our guest house.)

In the late afternoon, we took a balloon ride.

This landscape is astounding, delightful, unbelievable and the balloon ride was one of those rare treats that was as good as we had hoped it would be. Right up there with David or the Taj Mahal.

At the end the day, we had dinner on a rooftop Italian restaurant with a view of Moon Hill, listening to Frank Sinatra.

This is not my idea and I don't want to take credit for it, but I do believe it is insightful and true. It takes about fifty years for a new invention to bring about real change. To use the printing press and steam engine as examples:

When the printing press was first invented in Europe (it was invented in China earlier), it was primarily used to print Bibles. The same work monks had been doing for years by hand. It took about fifty years for people to start writing novels and plays to be published. In other words, for about fifty years, the printing press was just used to do the same thing faster. Then the printing press started to change the world: regular people became literate, people started to read to entertain themselves, to learn, to make the world a smaller place.

When the steam engine was first invented, it was used to run looms. It did the same work, faster, that had been done by hand for thousands of years. But that is all – the same work faster. It took about 50 years for people to put the steam engine and tracks (used much earlier in coal mines) together to form trains. When Ulysses S Grant was born, it was unusual for anybody to go further than they could ride a horse in a day. When he was a young man; he took his first train ride, hundreds of miles to Cincinnati. The first person in his family to do so. The north could not have won the Civil War without trains, the United States could not have become a continental empire in less than a generation without trains.

 When the computer was first invented, all it did was crunch numbers faster. And, now, fifty years later, I am sitting in a small village in China and I can read the New York Times or a neat article about graffiti on the Berlin wall. This has changed the world as powerfully and completely as the printing press or the train.