China Day 8

Today I woke up feeling slightly better than the worst I've ever felt (last night). I've never had a headache like that in my life. I felt like someone had shoved a spike in the base of my skull and it had lodged in my forehead. It was miserable. On top of that I was blowing my nose every few minutes. You can imagine that my sleep wasn't the most restful, so in interest of healing and not getting sicker before our whirlwind Shanghai adventure starting tomorrow I thought I'd better get some rest. I called Shifu for treatment advice and then sent my camera off with Carl for the day. This worked out on 2 counts.. I missed seeing the Great Wall, which was one of the few things I really wanted to catch, but still got pictures, and he got to try out a nice camera without having to buy it (he's looking to buy a digi SLR).
The rest of the group saw a jade factory (I heard it was another rip-off), Great Wall, and Ming Tomb. They lucked out and had the most beautiful day we'd seen since our first day in China.
I used that time to sleep, write postcards, sleep, get a treatment and some medicine from Master Wei, catch up the blog, sleep, and go out to dinner with Shifu, Ming, and Master Wei for a special mushroom shabu shabu with the family of the woman she's treating in the wheelchair. The soup was excellent. I could have eaten much more if I hadn't been coughing so much.
On the ride back to the hotel, Master Wei, Ming, and I exchanged hand games and puppets and laughed a lot. Good fun.

The sleep really helped me feel better but finding out that we are setting off for Shanghai at 530am (wake up call at 430am) wasn't a pretty thought. Shifu wasn't too happy about it either which I have to admit made me feel better that it wasn't just me being wimpy, it actually was unreasonable. Unfortunately for her though she had to miss a meeting which sucks.

Not much going on for me today, just a lot of much needed rest. I can't wait for the headache to completely go away. Right now it's at the constant dull ache level with moments of sharp pain. It's really annoying.

It does seem like most of the group is fighting off a nasty little asian bug, but I do feel confident that we'll come away from it ok - maybe just a few days of short tempers. The ridiculous tour company schedule isn't helping anyone and they don't seem to be very flexible.