Great News: Last week the local government decided that our school would be a site for China’s equivalent of the GED. Classes were canceled for Friday so people from around the city could come and take the test.
Danny and I each have Thursdays off, so the unexpected cancellation of Friday’s classes left us with a four-day weekend.Unexpected three and four day weekends have been pretty common throughout the semester. Even though we are only scheduled to have one official three day weekend this semester (Dragon Boat Festival, observed next weekend) We’ve already had three, three day weekends.
After toying with the idea of going to Beijing (a 15-20 hour train) we decided to go to Dehang (8 hours), a tiny village in a national park on the east side of Hunan Province.
Dehang
Dehang was pleasant. The village itself is mostly populated by the Miao (or Hmong) minority group and the women still wear traditional looking skirts and jewelry. The national park is dotted by steep karsts (see my post on Yangshuo).
We spent our two days at Dehang hiking, which was interesting because it was mostly walking up very big karsts, then walking down.
Steep karts.
But climbing was worth it, as it led to views like this:
There were tons of waterfalls in Dehang. Watching waterfalls is great and the waterfalls in Dehang were impressive, unfortunately all my pictures of the waterfalls look the same so I’ve included just the one.
Overall it was a good weekend. It was nice to get out of the city and into more rural settings.
One Year East 