What will be done with Maria...

April 2-5 I was in Lijiang city in Yunnan province. It's near the city of Kunming and very close to Tibet and Myanmar (Burma!! Why did you say Burma? I don't know, I panicked.) Why would one travel to the other side of the country, you ask. Because I had to for work. Rough I know. Each year we take a retreat for work and I am fortunate enough to be brought along.




Lijang has been named as one of the UNESCO historical sites, so there has been much care to restore the old town portion of the city. But it is not quite enough to stay in the old town, one must also venture out to see the beautiful scenery. Lijang is located in the foothills of the Himalayas and not too far from Shangri-la, a common jumping off point to travelers going to Tibet.

My trip to Lijiang was great because it wasn't somewhere that I would have traveled by myself. Now that I have seen Yunnan, there is so much more to be seen there. If you've heard of the Three Gorges Dam, the huge project that dams up the Yangtze River, this will make you just as sad. The Leaping Tiger Gorge, one of the most famous landmarks in China, is going to be dammed up as well. The plans are to blow up the rock formation that looks like the leaping tiger and then make a huge dam. This is such a tragedy I don't even have words. I was out voted on the choice of seeing this or the Snow Mountains, so looks like I'll have to plan another trip to see the Tiger Leaping Gorge before it gets destroyed.

Nothing like breaking out into show tunes or the Monty Python theme with your colleagues. Through out the weekend I was here, on of my bosses and I traded Python quotes. While in the Snow Mountains, we could not help but singing bits from the Sound of Music. This was unfortunately lost on our Chinese colleagues, but the hills were alive, what could we do?