On My Way to Seoul!

Usually travel days are uneventful which they should be but today was different and in a very good way.

I took Uber to BWI, leaving the house at least 40 minutes before I had to. You never know what the traffic is like on the Beltway and 95 and today, I was not about to risk missing my flight. The Uber driver was at my house in less than 5 minutes and in less than 40, we were at the airport. I arrived with more than plenty of time to check in and go through security.

Noodles and Dumplings.

A dish of dumplings from De Fa Chang Restaurant, Xi'an.  Yes, these are dumplings!
(Photo from Absolute China Tours.) 

For me, Chinese food is comfort food. No surprise given that is my heritage. 

Chinese cuisine offers a wide variety of food but two of my favorites are noodles and dumplings.  I am the Noodle Queen.  I can eat some form of noodle every day of the week though every now and again, I will break away from the noodle habit and indulge in some pasta.

Packing List. Korea and China.

Camels with a Howdah, by Émile Rouergue, 1855

I  may be going to the Silk Road but thankfully, I won't need a camel caravan to carry everything with me!

With trips to more countries than I can remember, I am now more than a seasoned traveler who knows how to pack a suitcase.   I have also done enough adventure travel to know how to pack really light.  At most, my suitcase now weighs in at no more than 13 kilos and that's if it's really, really, stuffed.  Typically, at the start of a trip, my faithful 22" Eagle Creek ORV Trunk suitcase tips the scale, fully packed, at under 12 kilos. 

Not bad as at that weight,  I can easily manage to hoist into the overhead compartment of the plane and I can easily carry it up and down stairs.  That suitcase has been with me since 2010 and despite all the beating and battering it has gone through, so far the only thing I've had to *repair* is a lost zipper pull.  A few more trips from now and I will likely have to replace the wheels.

Seriously Surreal. The Zhangye Danxia Landform.

Zhangye Danxia Landform. (Photo by By YubYub41.  Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.)

Danxia landform is a general term referring to a unique type of landscape found in southeast, southwest and northwest China.  Geologists believe that danxia topography was formed millions of years ago by the endogenous folding of layered oceanic crust.  Exogenous forces then created towering peaks, cave holes, and stone halls.