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It's the first post of the new year -- here's hoping friends and family, near and far and can look forward to a peaceful and happy new year.

I rang in the new year watching the English Premier League in, of all places, Guangning, about two hours northwest of Guangzhou. (Chelsea lost to Aston Villa, by the way. Pout.) It's a medium-sized burg, just large enough to support a decent hotel (thank heaven!) but too small to be modernized and (relatively) sanitized like the major metropolitan areas. How did I find myself in such a place?

My new petit ami invited me to join his family on a new year's weekend trip, going to:

• "Huang Yao Ancient Town" in Guangxi province, just to the west of Guangdong (dong 东 is east, xi 西 is west),
• Guangning for dinner with family friends and to spend the night,
• and last to a tangerine orchard up in the mountains to pick a couple of basketsful.

With my last grades turned on Friday, I was free to go and needed the rest. So off we went, early in the morning on Saturday.

Ancient Town

An "Ancient Town" like this one could be a dicey proposition. All too often, they have acquired the worst characteristics of modern Venice in Italy: inconvenient, expensive, crawling with tourists, and overrun with trinket shops that are lucky to rise to the level of an eyesore. Huang Yao was not any of those things, at least on a chilly December 31. I remember one street with souvenir shops, but the rest of the town was mostly unscathed. Some villagers had set up stalls where you could buy dessert or, at others, spicy pickled seasonings to use for cooking, but these, too, were scattered around and never crowded the scenery.

Nothing luxurious here. We took lunch at a restaurant located in one family's residence.

The town is nestled in the mountains and a small river runs through the middle. Despite the cloudy weather, it wasn't hard to find good places for pictures.

Even an old town can't completely avoid the pressures of modernization. What happens when a car, possibly under the control of an inebriated driver (or out of his control?), veers off of a narrow stone bridge with decorative railings that were plainly not designed to highway specifications?

Guangning dinner

A small and plain restaurant, but quite nice food. The first dish was puzzling, though. Several of the chunks of meat contained what looked like small rib bones, but far too small to be typical livestock (even chickens).

I found out later what it was.

Picking tangerines

Nothing really to say except that the location was serene and lovely.