Jiuzhaigou

Jiuzhaigou is easily the most beautiful place I have ever been. On Sunday we took a ten hour bus ride there and spent two nights with a Tibetan family on top of a mountain. We learned  a lot. For example, just because it isn't snowing in Chengdu doesn't mean it isn't snowing a few hours north/10,000 feet above Chengdu. I'll explain more soon.

Anyway, we got to the family's home and the grandmother cooked us dinner while we played with the grandson. He's 2 and a half and speaks fluent Mandarin and Tibetan. The grandmother's Chinese was about on par with mine and Alyssa's, so communicating was not difficult. We drank tea and ate their homemade bread topped with their own homemade honey. Dinner consisted of potatoes, more bread and honey, dried yak meat, and rice. Afterward, the oldest son came home and served us some of their (homemade) barley wine. It tasted a lot like some of the alcohol I tried when I was in Laos. (BTW, at this point still no snow).

After the barley wine was gone, we climbed up to the third floor of their cabin to find our room and went to sleep. I must have been really cold all night because I had multiple dreams about blankets, and when I woke up in the morning, I felt like I was going to die. No heat in the cabin, and there was a permanently cracked window in our room.

We ate breakfast at 7:00 am, before the sun came up. We had eggs, hot bread with honey, and (ugh) yak butter tea. Yak butter tea=liquid bleu cheese (basically). When we walked outside, we realized that the entire mountain was covered in snow and that the snow was still coming down pretty hard. And that's how our 8 hour hike started.

That's all I have time to write about today, but I will put pictures up as soon as my internet is better. I would recommend checking out my latest facebook pictures, if you're interested.