Parents, midterms, sick, Sichuan Province

For some reason none of the formatting is available with Safari on my friends computer, so no headings.

My parents came last weekend, so I did touristy things with them. That was good, since I'd done surprisingly little of it before by myself. First day, I took my parents and about 10 friends out to KTV (I'll get the pictures up once back in Nanjing). Spent all day 4 at the purple mountain, which is only 430 some meters tall, but is practically in Nanjing. I'd never really seen it though because of the smog. In between, ate a lot of good food.

Parents left monday night, so I pretty much spent all my time after that studying for midterms and being sick. Wednesday morning, I overslept and was awoken by a call from one of my classmates saying the midterm had started two minutes ago. Ran down 9 flights of stairs and took the test. I did fine, but over the course of the day I started feeling sick. I had a fever, so I got out of the next day's midterm which was this 10 minute dialogue that my partner and I hadn't written. In good enough shape the next morning to pack and make it on the plane to Chengdu, Sichuan Province.

Spent the first night in Chengdu, although we only really had time to eat dinner and crash because the next day we were going to Leshan. It was a two hour drive southwest of Chengdu. It's home of the largest sitting buddha which was carved into a cliff facing a river. It took 90 years to build and was completed in 803 A.D. It's supposedly like 24 stories tall, and it was pretty aweinspiring. We couldn't look up from the foot since there was a 3 hour wait. so we went right by it on the river.

Went to Mt. Emei city for the night, and today went up the mountain. The scenery was probably the best I've seen yet in China, practically a jungle. Back in Chengdu tonight and ate a hamburger at an excellent american-style restaurant. It's been so long since I've been american-style full, I practically can't move.