May 13. 2006

argh... internet still isn't letting me upload pictures onto this blog... i tried uploading them to yahoo photo, but that didn't work either.. i'll try imagestation...

gmail still isn't working.. and only today, i've been able to access my hotmail... so sorry to those who have e-mailed me and i haven't e-mailed them back. but qlink works.. so if you want to e-mail me, send it to 3wc3@qlink.queensu.ca

so, for the past 2 days, we've been on the other side of Hangzhou... Across the Thousand Island lakes. These islands were formed 50 years ago... originally, the land was just a bunch of mountains... and ppl lived in the areas below the mountains. but the government wanted to build a dam, so they evacuated all the villages in taht area... and built a dam.. because the dam was built, water just "accumulated" on one side of the dam... and the peaks of the mountains formed the "islands". to give you guys an idea of what a dam can do... one side of the dam is 70 metres higher than the other side... which is a huge difference.

ok, so 2 days ago we went inside this dam and got a tour. after that, we got on a boat to cruise over the thousand island lakes. we also had lunch on the boat. then, we got to hangzhou.. some of us dissected fish ... and then we had seminars at night. the funny thing was that we had to do the seminars in a karaoke bar... and so we could hear really bad chinese ppl singing in the room beside us the whole night.

After the semniars, we were just chilling in the karaoke bar... and then terrence and luke just picked up the mic and began singing "endless love"... haha.. then the song frm the titanic. soon, a bunch of us just stayed and sang backstreet boys ('get down', 'as long as you love me') and old school pop songs from M2M, etc... it was really funny and we ended up staying there for 2 and a half hours..

yesterday, we did a lot of habitat assessments and water sampling... so.. it was pretty boring. but at night, we went to a real tea house. it was cool because all you do is pay for your tea... and they give you a huge buffet of food/snacks (e.g. dumplings, french fries, dim sum stuff, candies, ice cream, fruits, vegetables).. and the place was really nice too..

ok that's it for now. for these next 2 days i'll be here on campus ... so hopefully i'll figure out a way to post pics!!

-will