In April, my travel buddies, Matt & Keith and I went to Yujiashitoucun, a very old village made entirely out of stones gathered from the surrounding hills. The entire villages lineage can be traced back to 4 brothers and their wives. This lineage has been carefully recorded on a gigantic tapestry.
This was by far the most interesting structure in the village...a "mad man" (according to the guide book) wanted to build a temple that went to heaven, but he would only work at night. He built this temple as all other buildings in the village were constructed: by carefully selecting stones in the surrounding hills and stacking them, using mud to hold the stones together.
This was the Food Safety Grade Notification in the only restaurant in town...yes, we still ate there!
These hills were terraced for as far as I could see. Locals have farmed the land by hand for hundreds of years. We went on a lovely hike, meandered through the farmland and nobody seemed to mind--I love that about China, you are free to explore pretty much anywhere you like.
We drove through this small town on our way to the stone village...it was a sort of sad and broken down place.
In January, I attended the annual Harbin Snow & Ice Festival in Harbin, China. I am SO far behind on my blogging that I am going to simply tell the story of the ice festival through photos...
It takes 30,000 people three months to build this city. Workers cut solid ice blocks out of the river and string LED lights throughout to create this....
We ran into a few friends from ISB...
Here's the river where the ice blocks come from. Apparently when they dismantle the city of ice, they just dump the blocks right back into the thawed-out river. It's an ENORMOUS river!
It was -40F!
