Happy new year!

Today is the first day of the Chinese new year, also known as the spring festival. I'm sitting in a cafe on the shore of Lugu Hu in the northeastern corner of Yunnan province, which as I already told you was in the southwest of China. This lake is a really amazing color of blue, and the sky above it somehow manages to complement it, and in between you have snow-covered forested hills with a mountain or two in the background. Amazing scenery.

I'm traveling now with a group of three people who I met in Dali, one of whom is from Minnesota, one from Japan, and the other from a different part of China. It's nice to be forced into speaking Chinese again since it's the common language we all share, if weakly. The day after tomorrow we'll be heading back to Dali, and I'm not sure what I'll do after that. There should be more internet connections there than there are here so I'll let you know where I'm headed before I leave.

Last night for the spring festival we went to a friend's family's house here near the lake and ate a wonderful dinner and stayed up snacking until midnight when of course we had to set off fireworks which looked amazing in the starry, moonless sky. It was mostly a peaceful night with the family, unlike new year's eve in the U.S., but it was very enjoyable and I did learn a little bit about the minority group that lives here. I'll write more about that when I get home. For now I'm going to go rent a bike and ride around in the hills surrounding the lake.