Yueyang

This weekend my friends and I traveled up to Yueyang, Hunan.  This town is about 1hour and 40 minutes away by train.  The train ride was easy, nothing too difficult.  There was a little child on the train who became a bit notorious.  He was such a little emperor.  If you don't know what that is, google it.  It is a growing problem in China, and we all wanted to smack him.  We arrived, dropped our stuff off and headed to see the sights.  We were up there partially to see our friend, partially to visit the town.  Our friend was busy until about 6.  So we headed to Yueyang Tower.  It is supposed to be one of the most beautiful pagoda's in southern China.  It has been burnt down a ton of times, and now is a rather nice park.  Not worth the 80 yuan they charged us.  They wouldn't give us a student discount.  Disappointing really.  Every person in Hunan talks about Zhangjiajie, Fenghuang, and Yueyang tower as the 3 main things to see in Hunan.  Now I have done all them!  It was a little surprising how anti-japan Yueyang was.  Little signs were all over the stores and every single Japanese car had either Chinese flags all over it, or anti-Japanese signs or both.

It was very odd to see.  And we were all made a little uncomfortable by it.  It is odd to be in a country where they feel really strongly against a country.  To wonder what exactly is going to happen between these two countries and these islands.  Especially when you think about the situation with Tibet.  If you don't know much about the Diaoyu islands and how they might possibly have something to do with Tibet.  Here is an interesting article I read on Shanghaiist.

http://shanghaiist.com/2012/09/22/tibet-ccp-sovereignty-legal-argument.php

Anyways, so the sights of Yueyang.  The tower was pretty cool.

And the weather was awesome!  The pollution was pretty bad, it was almost impossible to see the lake. Dongting lake, which is the 2nd largest freshwater lake in China!  The 1st is Qinghai lake.  This pagoda is the Yueyang Tower, it is not worth 80 yuan.  But beautiful.  Junshan island was amazing, the bus was a mere 5 yuan,  and drove us the long way around.  We started out being the only people on the bust, we were in the back.  The bus filled up, but no one noticed us.  Estelle and I were the only white people on the bus, obviously.  But at one point there was a bug next to us, a really big terrifying bug.  So we screamed and slid really far away, every single person on the bus turned and stared at us.  Then continued staring because we were foreigners.

But at one point we were driving on a road that should have been a one way, but they were driving both ways.  The road was a raised cement road that had water on both sides, the bus was swerving around fishermen and other cars.  But we arrived finally, and slipped in on a student fare.  30 yuan.  It was nice.  It was beautiful and quiet.  There were tons of temples, and statues and gardens.  Then we all met up, ate a fabulous yueyang dinner, sang KTV and danced the night away.
Which involved being groped by a drunk girl.. but I will talk about that more later.

LongXia (Cray fish in spicy sauce)