First and foremost, I owe the Chinese New Year an apology. Turns out, fireworks are both horribly addictive and wonderful to scare bad spirits away, and most of the excessive eating and seasonal dishes have special meanings. I actually decided to break with my vegetarian self for the evening and try at least a little bit of every food that had some meaning. I tried some of the home-made sausage that is hnug outside so that the community can feel the holiday approaching, new years fish to bring me wealth, a chicken wing that young women eat so that they can fly away to beautiful places, a dumpling with a coin inside which thankfully didn't break my teeth, and "long life noodles" first thing on the morning of the new year. I'm forgetting a lot here as dinner was before an evening of firework warfare... In my last post I mentioned fireworks in on three sides... I don't think there was a square meter free of explosives between dusk and midnight on New Years Eve. Also, on the 18th, the Xupings invited Randy, Weihe and I to come watch them pay homage to their ancestors at a nearby mountain temple, where Spring festival is the busiest time of the year. So, as much as television and development has interferred with tradition recently, in the countryside at least, much remains intact.

After the holiday in Dayi with Randy and the Xupings, I took off on a weeklong adventure through Guizhou and Guangxi, two provinces that are southeast of Sichuan. For the last few days my friend Nick and I have been hiking around in the pine forested mountains and Miao minority villages Eastern Guizhou. A few days ago we spent half a day snaking down a paddied mountain to a cluster of houses for lunch then walked along the river back to Xijiang, where we were staying with the family of a woman we met on the bus. The Miao are also famous for their embroidery, which is incredibly colorful and elaborate...I asked a woman in town to teach me, and should have a dragon ready to go by the time I get home. We're expecting it to be "cute" a.k.a. horribly botched, so I bought a few more authentic examples to share.
Yesterday we went to a bull fight (which directly translates from chinese as "cow fight") in another small community downstream and spent the day hanging over a bridge with a bunch of kids watching what we think are actually water buffalo ram eachother in a crowd of crouching men.

Now I'm in Sanjiang headed to Guilin tomorrow morning to meet my friend from GreenSOS who is from the area. We had about a dozen near death experiences on the bus careening alongside bottomless cliffs and sharing seats with ducks, chickens, and vomiting children on the way over, and there is absolutely no going back for me. Thank god for trains, planes, and the "supernaturally lovely karst topography" that awaits!