Final thoughts

I’m sitting in Germany in my new apartment (finally with internet and near my boyfriend, but I still need some time to really arrive) and thinking about my year in China which ended not long ago. Would words qualify to adequately put my experience in a nutshell? Or would this nutshell be overloaded and sink into the deep sea? I decided to quote three sources to give some hint of final thought, but I am sorry not to be able to cover all aspects of my experience. China, my Chinese friends, the Chinese culture and language – This is a Zaijian, not a bye-bye!

Confucius (Chinese philosopher):

'Wherever you go, go with all your heart'

Rosenstolz (only available in German):
'Irgendwo dazwischen'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQCFprahJq4

Jose Carreras and Sarah Brightmen:
'Amigos para siempre'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p25SJFT3yOw&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmHixVChbR4&feature=related

万古朋友?!

Tonight after work I had my official farewell party with my colleagues and my boss. Because we eat Chinese food everyday, I decided to go for something different, in this case German food. In Beijing there are around five German restaurants, but one of the best and most cozy ones - as the guide books claimed -is the 'Bodenseestube' above the South-German bakery. So that's where we went. The Knoedel (dumplings) didn't really convince my colleagues, but 'Schweinehaxen' (meat), 'Weisswuerste' ,'Wienerle' (two types of German sausages), 'Kaesespaetzle' (cheese swabian noodles), 'Flammkuchen' and especially pretzels were positively approved. I really enjoy going out with my colleagues because we just laugh so much together. Afterwards we went shopping and took some pictures. Tomorrow is my last working day in China. I will miss my nice colleagues and hope they follow my invitation to come to Germany some day, but anyway I am sure we will stay in touch.

Home invitation

Yesterday we didn't have to work in China because of the public holiday on Sunday. My boss had invited some colleague-friends (incl. two daughters) and me (with no daughter :-)) to her home in... well, some suburb of Beijing. We looked at her old photos (wedding, highschool, university etc), which was quite some fun, and at her fishes & crab. Afterwards she invited us to a restaurant in some kind of botanical garden and she used her professional equipment to take some photos of us all.

Today after work a colleague-friend invited me to some exquisite mushroom soup restaurant with her family - you possibly cannot imagine how many kind of mushrooms there are in China! Yummie! And I already received many most lovely gifts: small panda bears from my Chinese teacher here, a necklace and a Chinese silk fan from one colleague and a Beijing Opera Mask decoration for my new apartment from another Chinese friend. I will definitely miss many nice people here in China! But the countdown still shows three day...

Moonstruck and mooncake poisoned on 中秋节 / Zhong Qiu Jie Festival

Today is a Chinese festival, the Mid Autum Festival. Once again it's pretty much a festival connected with special food, in this case so-called 'yue bing' s, mooncakes. Mooncakes are small sweet cakes in different variations and with different fillings. Favorite fillings are an egg yolk , green tea and nuts. Moon cakes are famous gifts around the festival day and I also received some, but well... just a try of each type convinced me that mooncakes are not going to be my favorite food. So when we went to my last big brunch in China today, I preferred other food options to mooncakes...

Apart from eating mooncakes, the festival is famous for visiting lantern shows and looking up in the sky at night to admire the full moon which supposedly is the 'fullest' full moon of the whole year.

The Techno Chicken leads our way

8 am in the morning. Mr Liang's (our driver) new car (a Honda) was waiting for us in front of our condominium. On the way Mr Liang played his new techno CD with the "Techno Chicken Song" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8vafsaT0Wo at high volume... and we were more than awake when we reached our first destination also thanks to this extraordinary song.

Longqing Gorge (Longqing Xia) offered the following:
- an old rusty elevator, shaped and painted as a dragon from the outside, which can be found in the Guiness Book of World Records for being the world's longest chain of escalators in the world (258 m)

- boating in the gorge, climbing the mountain, watching wire rope artists and people bungee jumping and climbing the mountain of the Pagoda of Impression (most probably because on the way up you always have the impression that you have soon reached the top which is not true)

- a kitsch cave with fake cherry blossom, fake snow, fake panda bears, fake... well, everything was quite obviously fake and plastic.

Techno filled our car again as we approached our next stop - Guyaju (old apartments inside a hill, i.e. cave dwellings). It seems that the tribe of Xiyi lived inside these caves AD618-907, but it is unknown why they chose to live there. The mountain as a whole resembles an emmental cheese nowadays.

Summer palace revisited

"Every king or sovereign has to have a garden where he can promenade and where his eyes and mind can have a rest after the daily audiences are over and his public duties have been duly carried out. If there is such a place his mind feels fresh again and his temper well-balanced. Elsewise sensual desires would take hold of him and weaken his willpower." quotation of the young Qianlong king about Chinese landscape gardens like the summer palace (yiheyuan, 颐和园)

“The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.” Spontaneous Beijing

Why am I writing so often these days? Because I am enjoying some holiday:-). Today I followed the budhist saying "The way is not in the sky, the way is in the heart", looked at a Beijing map and decided to drive to Fayuansi, a buddhist temple not mentioned in my Beijing guidebook. My intuition was right: under a wonderful blue sky I visited this treasure of old buddha statues (some extraordinary ones like a wooden reclining buddha of 7.4 m), quiet courtyards and eager buddhists reciting buddha's words (some quite fast which made it sound a little bit like rap). Next to the temple was an old hutong which automatically made me want to enter and that's what I did. I followed the hutong lanes passing old houses, old men and women sitting on the street talking or playing Chinese chess, greeting me followed by the usual "hen gao, hen gao" (so tall - referring to my height) muttering. In some part of the hutong the wrecking ball ('Abrissbirne') showed signs of its presence and I wondered once more if that was a good or bad thing or maybe a combination of the two.

At the end of the hutong the atmosphere of the quarter changed: I had entered the biggest Muslim quarter of Beijing. Men wearing hats and long beards, women wearing a headscarf or in rare cases even a burqa mingled with Han Chinese. A small market sold muslim pastries... and I also found one or two mosques. One of them (called Niu Jie, Ox / Cow Street, existent since 996 AD) was open for visits and reminded me a lot of the Xi'an mosque which also has a distinctive Chinese style to it. What a 松快 day!

Saying goodbye to the pandas

The countdown of last ten days in Beijing will start tomorrow. But I already said goodbye to the national animal of China today. Where? In the Beijing zoo. They house several giant pandas brought there from Southern China for two main reasons: The Asian games (house 1) and the Olympic Games (house 2). From my Chengdu report you might already know that I like pandas. And they are vegetarian like me: "The panda has a diet which consists almost exclusively of bamboos." Here is the ultimate question for clever brains:-): which of the pandas on the photos are fake and which are real ones I saw in the zoo? One of the pandas was a special cutie: when I stood in front of him he turned to me and poked his tongue out at me!
The rest of the zoo was in parts quite shabby: broken glass, small enclosures and a little bit smelly in some parts so I left it soon and just visited the pandas and the fishes. Here is my opinion: Free the animals or treat them better! To properly finalize the panda experience I got myself the DVD of Kungfu Panda... and that's gonna be the movie for 2nite. A quote from the movie for you:

"Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift, and that is why it's called the present."

"Das Gestern ist Geschichte, das Morgen nur Gerüchte, doch das Heute ist die Gegenwart und die zu erleben ist ein Geschenk!" Maybe that's a true quote, but I am nevertheless going to miss the cute pandas and probably that's a good reason to come back some time...

Has the Mummy come back? Sandsliding in Tianmo desert

Yesterday another day trip brought us to:

-the smallest desert I've ever been to (well, not that I have been to many deserts...) named Tianmo. The tourist homepage of Hebei (the name of the province) proudly announces: "There are two grand sand dunes. The east sand dune is more than 300 meters long from north to south and the west one is nearly l,000 meters long." Couldn't have written that better - it's just that: two rather tiny sand dunes. We slid down the dunes, took photos, refused to take a horse ride (how bizarre to offer a horse ride in the desert) and looked for the mummy ('Die Mumie) but it didn't show up and scare us. Why the mummy? Tianmo desert and the surrounding areas are also a famous spot to film movies (some Chinese Hollywood), i.a. also a part of the film about the mummy's return was filmed there.

- a small ancient town named Jiming Yi. The village once had city walls of which most parts are still existing. It used to be an important post office of imperial times. Well, that doesn't mean that there was a postbox, but rather the messengers could exchange their horses there for fitter ones. The old town is quite relaxed: many old people still live there (we had the chance to visit some houses; the main decoration used are a TV and a big Mao poster) and there is not even a single souvenir shop (which is strange due to the fact that not many, but sufficient Chinese tourists come there).

Moo! Lele, the cow looks like a robot.. Opening Ceremony Paralympics

The Olympics are over, but Beijing is not yet falling asleep:the next big event started yesterday, the Paralympics. And this time we managed to get some tickets - thanks to the organisation of Agnes mum! Paralympics are for those athletes who have a 'body disability', i.e. wheelchair, blind, one legged etc. (For mentally ill people there's yet another Olympics, the Special Olympics..)

福牛乐乐 (the cow Lele) is the mascot of the 2008 Paralympic games. Interestingly, at the Paralympics there is also at least one discipline which doesn't exist in the normal Olympics named 'goalball'. What is goalball about? It's for blind or partially blind people.

"Participants compete in teams of three, and try to throw a ball that has bells embedded in it, into the opponents' goal. They must use the sound of the bell to judge the position and movement of the ball. Games consist of two 10 minute halves. Blindfolds allow partially sighted players to compete on an equal footing with blind players."

The Opening Ceremony was great! Again Zhang Yimou was the director and his composition was a mere pleasure except for the cow Lele dance where Lele more looked like an ugly robot than like a cow. When we entered the National Stadium (named bird's nest), there was a big bag waiting on our seat containing a Chinese flag, a IPC (International Paralympic Committee) flag, a torch, a bell to make noise etc. Before the opening ceremony began, they taught us how and when to use those devices. Quite some fun! And already more than worth the 80 kuai (8 EUR) which we had paid as entrance fee :-). They also managed to integrate the spirit of the paralympics into the opening ceremony by letting disabled people perfom e.g. a blind piano player, a wheelchair ballet dancer (of course from Sichuan). There was also a firework (not only then the stadium was trembling). In total 80.000 visitors. And the Olympic fire was lit in a spectacular way by a wheelchair athlete who, just using his hands, climbed up a long cord to the top of the stadium..

Alles in Buddha - Beijing Acrobatics &Pedicab tour

Here in Beijing there's still "alles in buddha". My final countdown of days here has started, but that's just a reason to join even more activities than before and don't wonder if I am writing too much in the next two weeks and you can't follow anymore.

Yesterday night we went to the Acrobatics show at Beijing Chaoyang Theatre. A show with real parrots and astounding acrobats (some seem to have rubber bodies because they were so flexible). And if you ever wondered if it feels comfortable to sit on one bike with two persons, well, they managed to pack over twelve people on one small standard bike!

Today in the morning I went to a hairdresser's. I think I didn't tell you yet that hairdressers here tend to be different from Germany:In Germany hairdressers are usually neatly dressed perfectly styled women. In China hairdressers are young unconventional men with tattered jeans ('zerrissene Jeans') whose own hair style looks quite unconventional as well. But luckily they still manage to cut my hair quite okay.

"Aller guten Rikschas sind zwei". After that I met Agnes and her parents who are on visit those days and we joined a Houhai pedicab ('Rikscha') tour - with Chinese language explanations and just three persons on one pedicab (we're not as good yet as the real acrobats from yesterday's show). Quite relaxed and also our drivers had no hurry. We visited some 'siheyuan's', the typcial old Beijing hutong buildings (20 yuan each) and refused to visit a third one because they were quite similar (not only in the price) and damn crowded. In one of the siheyuans I also rang the 'good wishes will come true' bell. And now? 'Noch ist nicht aller Peking abend'.

@Mona: danke fuer die Inspiration fuer eines der Sprichwoerter. Warte nun auf deinen Teil :-).

Cockroach attack

This time no travel adventure, but everyday challenge. In our office there are around thirteen people (the whole accounting and corporate controlling department) and it seems at least as many nasty unpleasant little animals. Nearly twice a week one of us women is shouting: "Aaaahhhhhhh!", followed by some jumping away from the respective desk and next: "He Yi, lai ba!" He Yi is one of the few male colleagues in the office. He Yi then tries to settle the matter.

So when some Chinese colleague wanted to know from me what to answer on the phone when I'm not in the office and somebody is calling me in German or English, I taught her some sentences like "She is in a meeting", 'She is having her lunch." as well as "She has escaped from the office because there are too many cockroaches"...

Krass in the Grassland

Welcome to 'Who wants to be a grass millionaire?'. You as a candidate have to answer the questions as good as you can by yourself - apart from that you can use a joker, our grassland cow, our grassland sheep or our grassland horse. But be careful, a 'moo' from the cow might not imply the right answer.

Question 1: Where did the grassland travellers from Beijing (i.a. Katharina, her colleague-friend Ya Jun with daughter Sisi / Julia sleep?
a. in a farmer's residence. The room was just big enough to fit in three beds next to each other and nothing more. The bathroom had a comfortable Chinese style toilet with infrequent water and a wash basin with no water.
b. on a horse like real Chinese grassland cowboys.

Question 2: What are the specifics of a Chinese grassland (5 hours drive from Beijing, named Bashang)?
a. the Olympic discipline of counting sheep did take place there. No gold medal was given to the winner as doping was suspected because the winner had eaten a sheep the day before.

b. grass, grass, grass everyhere, small hills, some flowers, seldomly ever trees, wild horses, shepherds with sheeps, cows with cowboys on motorbikes, small rural villages.

Question 3: Can you imagine the writer of this blog on a horse?
a. Yes, but the poor horse!
b. She managed to ride a horse for the second time in her adult life (for four hours). Although the landscape around her was nice, after that her bum was quite sore and she swore to herself not to ride a horse again soon.
Question 4: Do you think she also mounted a horse in the afternoon?
a. What a stupid question - Of course not! She went on a jeep along bumpy streets (well, not really streets, but earthern country ways without asphalt and plenty of puddles). When she and her co-travellers arrived at the destination, the wind was so cold that they preferred to take some photos and quickly get on the jeep again.
b. She is now a 'Hanni & Nanni' kind of woman, bought herself a horse and rode back all the way to Beijing where her horse is now living with her in her city apartment.

I know that was a tough challenge. So here's the right answers: a,b,b,a. The winner of 'Who wants to be a grass millionaire' receives just a blade of grass, not a million of grasses due to the game manager's contribution to environmental programs - Congratulations nevertheless! By the way: The author of this blog had quite some fun in the grassland despite the excellent accommodation, her pain and bumpy country roads thanks to the people coming along on this trip and the beautiful countryside (well, the grass basically...).

More raindrops are falling on my head - Lijiang culture

"Raindrops keep fallin' on my head

And just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed

Nothin' seems to fit

Those raindrops are fallin' on my head, they keep fallin'

Raindrops keep fallin' on my head

But that doesn't mean my eyes will soon be turnin' red

Cryin's not for me

Cause I'm never gonna stop the rain by complainin'

Because I'm free

Nothin's worryin' me"

(B.J. Thomas, lyrics of the song)

I followed the same motto. During my cultural explorations the rain was even heavier, but I didn't worry too much, took the umbrella from my cozy little hotel (Zen Garden hotel /Riheyuan, with excellent atmosphere and Naxi bread for breakfast) and went out in the search of... the charme of Lijiang and the minorities living in this old town.

The charme of the old town is obvious: canals, bridges, narrow cobblestone streets, Naxi style houses, small shops (of course it is touristy..), cafés and restaurants. It's over 800 years old, and guess what? Unesco World Heritage.

In Yunnan 21 minorities are living more or less peacefully together. The main minority in Lijiang (two third of the inhabitants), the Naxi, originate from the neighbouring province of Tibet. Astonishingly Naxi women still wear their traditional costume (not for tourists, but in everyday life). The Dongba are Naxi shamans working as healers (drive the devil out of people) or mediators between Naxis and the spiritual world. They still exist, but you cannot just decide to become a Dongba, which endangeres their future. To become a Dongba, your father has to be a Dongba as well and you have to be male. In order to make sure this profession doesn't cease to exist, the Chinese government allows Dongbas to have up to three children instead of the usual one child (Chinese one-child-policy).
One sub-tribe of the Naxi doesn't marry. Their culture is matriarchal. The men just spend the night at the womens' home and after some time the women quit the men and look for new lovers. When the woman is pregnant, paternity doesn't play a role - they raise the child by themselves. Women also inherited all property in the past when the parents died.
Naxi also had a own writing system consisting of pictographs which is also quite interesting.

If you want to know more about the Naxi, feel free to read e.g. wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakhi.

P.S: One of the photos is from a Naxi music show. The wikipedia link also includes some information about the famous Naxi music.

Raindrops are falling on my head - Yunnan nature

Dear readers of my blog :-), I split this trip into two parts: 'Raindrops are falling on my head - Yunnan nature' and 'More raindrops are falling on my head -Lijiang culture'.
When I arrived in Lijiang in Southern China, I had already a cold, my nose was running and I was coughing continuously. And what expected me there? Rain, rain, rain. I spent five days in and around Lijiang and every day it rained, except for the breaks in between. Luckily on those days I ventured the nature around Lijiang the weather was a little bit better (meaning it did not rain all day).

The nature around Lijiang (normal level is 1500-2000m above sea level) is manifold: rice paddies, mountains and ironically sunflowers everywhere. The earth is often of red colour like in the neighbouring countries (e.g. Birma). The highlights:

- Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (Yulong Xieshan). The Naxi minority (a minority in this area, see also the culture part) believes that their gods live there. From a nice meadow you sometimes can see the all year round snow-covered peak (when I was there it was hidden by clouds - yes, rain clouds of course). Until about 50 years ago, Naxi marriages were arranged when the children were two years old. When the children grew up, they used tof all in love with somebody, but seldomly with the person they were engaged with since young years on their parents' decision. That's why the harmless looking meadow used to be a mekka for youngsters in love committing suicide.

- Tiger Leaping Gorge (Hutiao Xia): Impressive! A 17 km long gorge, one of the deepest of the world. The continuous rain on the day before made the river rushing down even more impressive because more water was in it. Luckily, though, it didn't rain on the morning I was there - The days before it had been closed due to heavy rains and the implicit dangers at such a deep gorge. Legend has it that a Naxi hunter wanted to hunt. A tiger was leaping across the gorge, but for the hunter it didn't make sense to shoot him since the tiger was on the other side of the gorge where he could not have accessed his victim.