The Mother Country

So China (with la familia loui) was amazing. First, we visited the villages my grandparents were from. This is a pic of the house my mom's mom grew up in, outside of Kaiping, a city in southern China.
Then, we jetted over to Guilin, where we took a boat cruise down the Li River to Yangshuo, which is totally surrounded by these crazy limestone hills that are so picturesque, they are featured on the back of the 20 yuan bill.

From there, we went to Beijing, where among other activities, we sampled all kinds of yummy street food, and made obligatory visits to the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, and the Great Wall.

Next up was Shanghai. What I remember from there was that it was super hot, I got an amazing hour-long foot massage, and I generally stuffed myself with all kinds of dim sum delicacies.

Finally, we ended our trip in Hong Kong which has all these crazy skywalks between buildings, tons of super-luxury shopping (none of which i partook in on my student budget), and all these random outdoor escalators, which i fell in love with. Here's the HK skyline at night from across in Kowloon.

I'm back in sunny AZ right now where it was 112 degrees yesterday. Thinking of y'all wherever you are!