"I'm saving all my love, yes I'm saving all my love, I'm saving all my love for you!"
Pingyao was an awesome place to visit, and I'd love to go back someday. It was a very friendly, very felaxed, very beautiful little city, and reminded me of the awesomeness that is Bali, so you know it's gotta be good. My run (about a whole week after the Hua Shan visit due to just how smashed my legs were after all those steps) through Pingyao involved running out into the beautiful, but dusty, countryside for a few kilometres before running completely around the outside walls of the city, in the beautiful first light of the day and vast orange orb of sun.
"I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone's shadows! If I fail, if I succeed, at least I'll have my dig-ni-ty!"
Here are a few shots from beautiful Pingyao (which I've renamed 'Ping-WOW!' as it's such a cool place to visit) to give you an idea. You can't tell in the photos how dusty/muddy things were though, but you get that I suppose with a walled city where mud is a major component of its construction. Didn't seem to bother the relaxed and happy local residents though.
We also visited the amazing Yungang Caves up near Datong at the very top of the province. AMAZING huge, intricately carved and patterned Buddha sculptures set into a rock wall. No running took place here, just some slow shuffling between each fantastic cave with massive gaping looks of awe plastered on our surprised faces. Unfortunately they didn't let us take photos of the really, absolutely, out of this world, amazeballs caves and statues, however here are a few of the ones we could capture:
Aaaannnd, that's it for Shanxi province. Next up will be our final province, the very large, very beautiful Inner Mongolia, where I managed to get 5 awesome runs in. More on that in the next post.
Have a wonderful weekend everyone! I'll leave you with this, courtesy of my recent Whitney education/indoctrination:
"Learning to love yourself, is the greatest, looovve, of all!"
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