黄山

hello, guys, future me.  I'm currently sitting at the hotel lobby/bar. whiskey on the rocks is 32 rmb, which is around 5 greenbacks.  on my second one, and my excuse (TRUTH) is that i have a sore throat and need bacterial cleansing.  They did not have (did not know) a hot toddy.  tried my google best, but to no avail.

Today was pretty good.  Huang shan is absolutely breathtaking.  1700km elevation at our lowest after the tram.  Crouching tiger hidden dragon was shot there. Oh, a joke that a fellow tour mate made. Crouching in Chinese sounds like “hungry” and hidden sounds like “bed”. So the analogy is that the tiger is hungry for a bedding with the dragon.  Hahahahahaha, I’m done.  During the ride up, there was a mixture of bamboo and non-bamboo trees (the “regular” ones with brown trunks, branches and green leaves). Made a pitstop to buy these hiking sticks, but both my dad and I were too stubborn to admit that we might need its assistance.  That place was filled with what I thought were floating dandelions, but were all just really chubby pale flies. There were a lot of them.  Tour guide was chill as fuck.  There were old people on the trip (as I’ve said repeatedly), but he don’t give a fuck. They just gotta keep up.  As the tram went up, it felt like I was passing different pieces of Chinese landscape paintings.  Its really incredible that as artists use nature as a reference for their artwork, we (those who do not have the capacity to frequent beautiful places) use artworks to make sense of the beauty in nature.  And they do a marvelous job to abstractly represent how expansive and far reaching these mountains actually seem.  There wasn’t that feeling of how small I was in relationship to something so sublime, but it was more a respect for how the sublime could offer me this experience. To see something larger than a metropolitan area, to experience an environment not solely designed for humans, and that reminded me of it is most ideal to live synergistically.  That the world isn’t designed for humans.  But then I look at the rocks I am standing on that have been blasted into steps, how inaccessible this view is to an untouched mountain.