Last minute changes!

Of course over the last week I've made a few small changes to my itinerary.

I've been advised to not travel from Dengfeng to Xi'an on May 4, as this is in the middle of the May 1-6 holiday.  There will be millions of people travelling and "You will not have a good time."  So, I'm delaying my travel to Xi'an until May 6, and taking the opportunity to spend a coupe of days in Luoyang to take in the famous Peony Festival.  The hotels in Luoyang at this time are hard to come by and not cheap!

I've signed up for some Chinese classes in Chengdu at the Chinese Language Center (http://www.clcchengdu.net).

And I've booked into a 2 week immersion program at the Chinese Language Institute in Guilin (http://studycli.org).  For this program I also booked a home-stay, so I'll be living for 2 weeks with a Chinese family.  How exciting!  I expect I'll be fully fluent by the time I get home :-)