I can't believe how fast a month went by in China!!

It was for sure a huge cultural shock but also a good experience I might say. The last 4 days of my trip I spent them in a town called Dali in Yunnan Province. Dali is supposed to be a hippie-ish town but I found it to be pretty much like many of the made up towns around China with its renovated building and lots of shops (I did not see the hippie-ish side of it!) The town is for sure more Westernized that any other small Chinese town and it's full of cute little cafes and restaurants.



The scenery around Dali is simply beautiful but due to the weather it was always foggy and rainy.

When I arrived in Dali i went out to explore the city and see what it had to offer. I walked along the main street where the shops and all the people are and there was nothing really special about it, it looked like a Lijiang or a Shuhe. I kept walking until I hit the city wall and I walked up for a stroll.


I really enjoyed walking the wall and looking at the roof tops and the mountains.


During my wall walk I saw at least 7 couples taking engagement/ marriage pictures. Most of the girls were wearing red dresses and a couple of them had more traditional/ western white dresses. I was curious about why they all had red dresses and a friend told me that it was probably because the color red is associated with good luck!





At the hostel I met a girl that belongs to the Girls Love Travel group, the facebook group for female travelers, and spent most of our time there together.

On my 2nd day we decided to rent a bike and go down to Erhai lake.
We walked to the bike rental thinking that we wouldn't pay more than 20 yuans per bike each and when we got there we saw a double bike for 40yuans! A double bike?!?! That sounds like a lot of fun!
We definitely looked like tourists riding through Dali and the villages around in a double bike with a roof! haha The roof came in handy at various times when the rain just poured down on us.

Cycling around Dali was ok, the biggest challenge came when we had to go down to the main road (like their highway) and we actually had to cross 4 lanes, trying to avoid getting killed by the cars that don't care about the 2 tourist riding the funny looking bike. I think both Ida and myself screamed a lot while pedaling as fast as we could!



Once we made it to the villages it was a nice and easy ride. We passed through the fields and saw people working on the land, cutting bokchoy, pulling carts with vegetables, and doing their everyday routine! It was actually a super cool experience!



We kept pedaling and probably got lost once or twice around the village! Turning the bike around when we hit a dead end was the most "fun" part of our ride; we did it so much that at the end we were pros at turning the bike around!

After an hour or two of pedaling we finally reached the lake... a windy windy lake!



Overall the bike ride was a whole lot of fun although we got rained on and we almost had a couple of heart attacks crossing the big streets it was all worth it!

The next two days I spent it walking the streets of Dali (mainly looking for closed restaurants with Ida) and eating lots of food! A good thing about Dali was that since it had a lot of Westerners it also had Western food and my favorite dish... a plate of cheese! Oh! I missed cheese!


While walking the streets we also saw many shops selling huge cups with mango puree, whipped cream, and shaved mango... We just had to get one! (and it actually was bigger than my head!)




On tuesday november 8th, aka the saddest day in American politics, I took the bus to Kunming from Dali to get on a flight out of China. I spent 5-6 hours stuck inside a bus with nothing to do but pushing the refresh button on my phone to see how the elections were going. That morning (night in El Salvador) my mom texted me and asked me about the elections and said that Trump was winning, I assured her that we had a lot of time left and explained a little bit how elections work in the U.S and told her that we still had a lot of time (by then votes from Florida were not even counted.)

I was sure Hillary was going to win, never ever it crossed my mind that Trump would win, I was confident. As time passed I grew more and more anxious, I ate like 3 snickers, Ida gave me Oreos, I was so nervous. I turned off my phone and prayed, I was still confident, I still believed in American people. My stomach hurt, I was nervous, I turned on my phone... the map looked very red! I turned off my phone!

Was that really happening? was the map really red? or was it a prank? I was really hoping for a miracle. I looked around me and all the Chinese people were just living their regular life, playing games on their phones, sleeping... Didn't they know that the U.S was in a middle of a crisis? haha I just wanted everybody to share my shock and disbelief with what was happening! Good thing I had Ida next to me.

As time passed the more I realized that the map wasn't going to change, once Florida was red I kind of knew that was it. At one point I was on whataspp with my best friends and tears of sadness just started pouring out of my eyes! Do people really believe a guy like Trump would be a good leader? Is that what we want for our future? Is that what we want our children to look up to? A guy who wants to build a  wall between people, a guy who insults whoever he wants, a guy who doesn't respect women... Really? My heart was broken to know that so many people think that they (that we) deserve that.

That morning I was excited, that morning I said I wish I could be at home and celebrate such an amazing day; I wished I could be there just as I was when Obama won, twice. That night I went to bed sad, and angry, and disappointed, and hopeless. I thought, tomorrow will be a better day!