Lijiang

Lijiang for me, is like the Brugge of China.

It's old Cobbled streets, beautiful crafted shops, yummy food and unfortunately expensive way of life made me feel warm and excited every time I stepped onto its stonie pathways.
During the day it was filled with shopaholics, tea lovers and many many tourists. At night it was filled with fairy lights, drunk karaoke Chinese teenagers and live music.

The walk up to black dragon Poole split up our day. When walking through the gates the scenery took our breathe away. With a mijestic

mountain framed by beautiful Chinese architecture and greenery. One thing in Chine I found quite odd was the lack of people sitting on the grass (we all know it's an englishmans fancy during the summer) so it was disheartening to figure out, the hard way, that the grass is off limits! Such a shame with such beautiful scenery.

After a few days of roaming around the old town enjoying it's alleyways and shops we decided to head out into the biashi village.
Biashi Ancient Town is one of the oldest zones in the city of Lijiang. It got its name of “Baisha,” meaning “white sand. I was incredibly excited to find out that this village is famous for its hand embroidery. They have kept the same techniques for centuries. Teaching from Baishi teacher to its Baishi children. Always keeping the secret within the village walls. The only way to explain there embroidery is to say it looked like a painting. The shading was perfect(unfortunately I

couldn't take pictures or afford a piece) I was fortunate for them to show me a few techniques but not how to execute them into an image. This takes years of training.

Once I spent an considerable amount of time with the embroidery school. We headed out into the village. Getting lost in the alleyways we were greeted by a little old biashi lady. She stopped us and showed us into her home for tea and snacks. Confused and curious we followed. With no language between us we enjoyed each others company with make shift hand language and a lot of laughter. We realised she was just an little old lady with no way to travel so brought the travellers to her to explore our weird and wonderful ways. We left with a wholesome, happy heart and a bag of sweets she made us take with us.......this for me is the wonder of travelling I always hope to catch and when I catch it I feel truly blessed.