Oh. It's Moanday and I went to bed too late last night and it's beautifully cloudy and pre-rainy and I don't wanna go to yoga and I don't wanna blog.

But I'm gonna. Fortunately, it looks like the majority of the girls' day will be spent traveling from one place to another, so I feel very comfortable with lowballing this one.

This morning seems to be Immerse Yourself in Your Local Culture Day. The girls will start by visiting a local market. As someone who loves to find weird food to look at (not necessarily eat, depending on the width and depth of its weirdness, mind you), this would be my little slice of heaven. One of the funniest memories I have of my last trip to Scotland was when my fellow travelers and I went to the supermarket for the first time. Everything was so new and interesting and different that we acted like crazy kids in a candy store. Not only did we pile everything that looked good into our basket without discretion, we had to show it to each other first so that it could be properly oohed and ahhed over. The end result is that we had to feed a whole lot of that food to a poor and probably permanently damaged seagull when we ran out of time to eat it (one of my previous blogs has a picture of said seagull, but I'm too tired to go looking for it as a reference.).

Above you will find dried rats. Blech.

After they pry those tourists' bodies out of the store with threats and crowbars, they'll move on to see a local kindergarten. I'm envisioning a school performance with beautiful Asian children mimicking English words modeled by their teacher while performing some kind of a Chinese dance. I can see this perfectly; the audience will only see the teacher's back, but the kids will see her e-nun-ci-at-ing each and every syllable with a very dramatic oral presentation while she eyeballs the kids that she just knows are going to misbehave and mentally registers their names for later beatings. Or wait, am I confusing that with my afternoon? Never mind.

(FYI, for an interesting article about the gender imbalance occuring in China due to the government-mandated limits on the number of births per family, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6346931.stm.)

After all this fun, including lunch in a Shanghai family's home, durn it, they'll climb onto a plane to head to Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province. Wuhan is well-known as the most important site of the revolution and is also the gateway to the Yangtze Gorges, which will feature heavily in later blogs. They won't stay long in Wuhan, but it's still worth noting a few facts about the city here. For starters, it's huge--over 9 million people live there. Ugh. Here's some information I plagiarized about the city:

Situated at the crossroads of central China, Wuhan is a transportation hub for air, railway as well as ferry traffic. The distance from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou is more or less equal. And the giant Yangtse River (Chang Jiang), the world's third longest river, and the Han River pass through the city. With a history that dates back more than 3500 years, Wuhan is one of the “Chinese Famous Cities of History and Culture”. Here and around East Lake you will find historical sites and beautiful nature. The main landmark inside the city is the Yellow Crane Tower.Since 1927 Wuhan has comprised of three cities, Hankou, Hanyang, and Wuchang, which are located where the Han and Xunshi rivers join the Yangtze (Chan Jiang).

Not only is that Wuhan, but that's all, folks. It's time for yoga!