Weekend in Hengshan (衡山)

This last weekend, I got to hang out with a few Stanford friends at Hengshan, Hunan. One of them, Daniel, taught English at Henghan for a year through a Stanford program called VIA (Visitors in Asia), so we got to visit the school that he taught at and meet up with some this year's teachers (who were also Stanford grads!). We got off work on Friday, hopped on a train at 10pm and arrived at Hengshan at 6am the following day. To get back, we hopped on the 11pm train on Sunday night and arrived in Shenzhen at 7am so we could get to work on Monday. Fun fun!

We spent the weekend hiking up Hengshan, eating lots of Hunan food (not as spicy as I thought), and hanging out at the school Daniel used to teach at.

 Hengshan is one of the 5 Taoist mountains in China. I got to hike Huashan, another Taoist mountain, with my little sister a few months ago. I guess this means I have three more to go!

 
 I got to walk around some markets where you can buy dog meat, fresh frogs, and pig feet.

I think I'll probably take a break from traveling this weekend and next weekend, so I can plan for my big trip with my dad from Sept 25 - Oct 11. We're going from Beijing - Luoyang - Xi'an - Jiuzhaigou. It's going to be awesome!

Emoi - Staples meets Ikea

I found a really neat store the other day call Emoi (http://www.emoilife.com/en/index.php). Essentially, it's the Chinese version of Muji, which you probably haven't heard of since there's only one store in the US, and it's in NY.

It's pretty exciting. The only problem now is if I buy something, I'm not sure how I'm going to get it back to CA when I move back. Maybe I should worry about that later?