Saturday

Today I do two postings. One for Saturday and one for Sunday. This enables me to easily attach more photos.

Friday night I went out for dinner with Barbara (the Malaysian). We went to a good Vietnamese restaurant where they had similar dishes to our favorite Vietnamise restaurant in Berlin Spandau (do you remember? - they even had the same spring rolls and a similar vegetable curry!). They just offered some weird additional foodstuff. For dessert I had sweet rice with durian. You might ask yourself now: what the hell is durian?

I never had this fruit before and it's actually quite weird. It's called the "king of fruits" by South-East Asian people. The flesh which you can eat has yellow colour and the speciality is that it smells! To me the dish smelled of sports shoes with a lot of sweat in them. This doesn't really sound delicious. But the taste was OK. I'm not a new fan of durian, but I can manage to eat it and I don't have problems about still having the durian taste in my mouth three days afterwards like others. If your interested in durian fruit, pls. also check: http://bethge.freepage.de/duriandt.htm (the webpage is in German, but it has photos of the fruit and provides some nice explanation).

On Saturday, a Chinese colleague of mine (Sun-ya) had invited me to visit her home and get to know her family. This was a very nice experience. Both her husband and her daughter are very nice. Her daughter learns English at school but she was quite shy and didn't dare to talk a lot with me at first. For lunch they invited me to some Vegetarian buddhist restaurant near the Lama Temple "Yong he gong". They had delicious meat and fish imitations as well as "haochi" vegetables. I can't really tell the name of the vegetables I ate because I never or hardly ever saw them before in my life, but they were delicious. Vegetarian buddhist meant they didn't have any dishes with fish, meat, pork, garlic and onions. Neither do they serve alcoholic drinks.

Saturday night Rebecca (a Swedish-American woman from the language school) and me wanted to go to a cinema to watch a Chinese movie with English subtitles. It's called "Lost in Beijing". But when we got to the cinema there was a big sign saying that the cinema apologizes but they need to close until January because the landlord just decided to do some renovation work. What a pity! So instead we had a coffee together and chatted about our Asian experience which was interesting because Rebecca studied Japanese (language and history) before and can compare her Japanese experiences with our Chinese experiences.

Today's fotos show:

1.a typical Chinese foodstall on the street

2. a cushion I got as a present from a colleague (I'm not gonna comment further)