Lijiang (initial summary)

So we took an overnight train to Lijiang which left at 10:50 and then arrived the next morning at 7:40 and I only woke up twice during the night. The “cabin” (we didn’t have a door) was actually better than when I took my first train ride in China thirteen years ago. The beds however were a little short. Well, luckily our driver did show up on time to pick us up from the train station. So our accommodations were a “timeshare” house. It was nice. There were heated beds which was positive, but we did not have 24 hour hot water. The housekeeper would only turn it on at certain times during the day which was times when we were usually not there. So I only took was able to take 2-3 showers during our nine days there. Since a friend of the family was paying for all of the accommodations, we were “forced” (Chinese custom is we are “bound” to our host) to spend lots of time with her and her family. I am not saying it was all bad, but sometimes we (they) were just sitting around talking (in Chinese) and my language comprehension is not all back to where I could only understand about half of what they were saying. We did visit a couple of places which I will point out in more posts to come. We visited the two “old town” tourist locations, tiger leaping gorge, a pagoda, and a trade route. Snow Mountain is the big tourist trap in the area. We, however, did not go up the mountain because 1. There is just snow on the mountain. 2. There was a fire at the base camp 3. It was going to cost around 500+ RMB. Snow Mountain highest point at which people can hike up to 4500 meters where there is a rock that you take your picture in front of. Not really interesting for me personally.
I have to compress all of my pictures down to make them more webpage compatible.