Back from China!

We have returned from China. Our experience on this Shai Bar Ilan tour was once again fantastic! We landed in Beijing and hit the ground running. Each day was filled with beauty and wonder. From the Summer Palace to the Temple of Heaven and Forbidden City, we saw Beijing’s wonders, stopping for a most welcome foot massage. We flew to Xian and saw the wondrous Terracotta Warriors, thousands of them, each different from the others, no two the same. We flew to Chengdu and were lucky enough to see a number of pandas up close, including a look into the nursery where four baby pandas were lying in their cribs. We went to LeShan and saw the world’d largest sitting Buddha. We flew to Kunming and marveled at the beauty of the Stone Forest. Later in Guilin, we saw cormorant fishing and traveled to Yung Shuo to cruise down the Li River and see the magnificent scenery. We traveled up a 1.5 kilometer chairlift to the top of a mountain overlooking picturesque Guilin and then went on to Hangzhou to see a tea plantation and the beautiful West Lake and then we went on to Suzhou to see the production of silk and a The Master Fisherman Garden. In Shanghai we saw yet another beautiful garden, the Yu Yuan Garden. China consists of some 55 minority ethnic groups with the majority group, the Han, making up 92% of the Chinese population. We got to meet some of the people who are members of the Zhwang group (the largest of the minorities) and of the Yao group. Each group has its own language, customs, land area, and crafts. We enjoyed Chinese dance, music, and art. All in all, it was a dream vacation and one that restores one’s love for beauty and one’s sense of transcendence.

You can see my pictures at this location.