Riding horses, new toufa style and shopping pearls

Riding horses

For Saturday, my Chinese colleague-friend and her family had invited me to go horse riding with them. As I'm a little bit scared of horses and haven't been on one since very young age, I just promised to watch their daughter (Julia) ride on the horse and enjoy the nature.

But watching their daughter ride on the bike (looked quite professional already), I felt I should just try it as well.

So that's what I did. I got a bigger horse named "Ping Ping" (one meaning of the Chinese word "ping" is bottle, but probably it's another pronunciation and meaning of "ping"or would you wanna call a horse "bottle bottle"?) and a teacher.

It's not easy getting on a big horse and of course horses don't keep quiet when you try to seat yourself in the saddle, but I somehow managed. The lesson itself was unspectacular - I was being taught basics - the correct feet position etc. - except once when the horse didn't want to listen to the teacher anymore, just ran off and I had to try hard to stay on the horse and not fall down.

After this lesson I knew that riding horses can be considered as sport as you really have to use your muscles!

Pot hot, hot pot...

For dinner I met Barbara (the Malaysian friend), her boyfriend and some friend of theirs for hotpot. Hotpot is some soup pot where you insert whatever you want to eat (mushrooms, frozen tofu, green vegetables). We were quite an international group: 1 Malaysian, 1 English, 1 Austrian, 1 Australian, 1 Scottish, 1 Chinese and 1 German! The Chinese lady was quite a personality: Because she didn't like the food, she complained very loud and very angry - I was quite astonished about her straightforward way. I also got to know the sad news about Tibet from Barbara's boyfriend. I really hope there's gonna be a peaceful solution!

Shopping pearl necklaces

Today I went shopping with Claudia. We went to Hongqiao market which has a fame for both real and fake pearls. After the shopassistent of one of the marketstalls had scratched with her scissors on the pearl and the pearl was still ok and without scratches, we were convinced that this were not plastic pearls. However, we still bargained hard and I think we got the necklaces for good prices. We also bought fans with Chinese style paintings on them before we set off to walk around in Tiantan park in the nice weather.

I wish you all a relaxed new week!