Foreign adventures :-)

Last week I spent with my boyfriend in Germany. He had a birthday party with barbecue which was very nice (also thanks to the nice weather). We went swimming, to the cinema, visited Weissenburg (known for its Roman history) and the Wuelzburg (a castle where Charles de Gaulle was kept as prisoner long ago) and enjoyed the good German asparagus. I also bought some new shoes - due to my shoe seize it's hard to find shoes in China.

Sunday and Chinese poems

No Sunday adventures to tell you. After having been two weeks on the road, I just relaxed.

I also admired a new present from a Chinese person I know, a mobile phone bag in the form of a dog (see photo). Well, isn't it lovely, especially together with my Chinese mobile which my colleagues decorated with pink shamrocks (German: Kleeblatt)!

Apart from that I want to write a little bit about Chinese poetry. Given the fact that China had a troublesome history in the past, also the poems reflect that. If you are interested I would just like to give you one example called 'Crossing the Han river':

' No news, no letters - all winter, all spring -
Beyond the mountains
With every homeward step more timid still

I dare not even inquire of passerby'

The context of the poem is interesting as well: ' Song Zhiwen, the author of the poem, was known as a unsavoury character who pandered to the empress Wu Zhao's lover Zhang Yibi, fell from power along with Zhang, and was eventually found guilty opf accepting bribes and executed. He really had good reason to fear returning home from exile...'

Saturday in Tianjin

Yesterday our project team had a workshop in Tianjin (approximately two hours by car from Beijing), so I decided to stay there overnight and visit the city of Tianjin on Saturday.

Wherever I went in Tianjin there was something common: road works and construction works were going on. Maybe this is also due to the Olympics (some events will take place in Tianjin). Old hutongs are being demolished and neat houses built instead, old colonial houses are being renovated, roads are being built.

Interesting parts of Tianjin history:

1. In 1856 Chinese soldiers went on board of the "The Arrow", a Chinese-owned ship flying under the British flag because the ship was suspected of piracy, smuggling and of being engaged in opium trade. The Chinese imprisoned 12 men. In response the British and French sent gunboats to capture a fortification near Tianjin. At the end of the first part of the so-called Second Opium War, the Chinese had to sign the Treaty of Tianjin, which opened Tianjin to foreign trade. Many foreigners settled in (British, French, Italians, Germans, Russians etc) and each of these nationalities established a concession with own school, prison and hospitals.

2. In 1870 the Chinese locals attacked an orphanage managed by the French and kidnapped the nuns working there because they had heard that the children were being eaten. They had misunderstood the bible's concept of the sacraments and the body and blood of Jesus.

Still today many old colonial houses in English, French, Russian and other styles can be seen in the streets of Tianjin. Some of them have been renovated, others are abandoned and have a degenerate charm about them.

Another sights I visited were the 'Ancient Culture Street' and the 'Old Town' around Tianjins Bell Tower. This was really disappointing! The 'AAAA' rated 'first class Chinese tourist place' didn't convince me at all. Why? Well, neither the ancient culture street nor the old town were old. All the houses had been recently built, just in a somewhat old style, and all of them house tourist shops. If you are the last day in China and need a souvenir, this is maybe just the place to go to. A look behind the facades sometimes showed the real Chinese backstreets of Tianjin, but most of these have already been demolished.

Shanghai, trains, earthquake

" Arriving passengers, please forward door alight!" - that's one of the signs with instructions on Chinese trains. If you don't know what that means there is still luckily the Chinese text on the sign which says "Arriving passengers please use the door in front of the waggon to exit the train."

Another funny translation on Chinese trains is the name of the town 'Guiyang". That's really a town name and on the English sign it probably should just say 'Guiyang'. However, the Chinese word 'gui' also means 'expensive' and 'yang' means 'sun' that's why the Chinese railway company proudly presents trains going to the Expensive Sun. Aha.

But originally I shortly wanted to write about last Sunday which I spent in Shanghai. On this very day I visited the Shanghai museum with a lot of old Chinese landscape paintings, sculptures and stamps and the Jade Budha Temple (Yufo Si). Yufo Si is still a very active temple with crowds of people going there to pray. Its Jade Buddha is wellknown and it says that it was brought to China from Birma. After a stroll on the bund (under the deep blue sky!) I took my parents out for dinner because it was the last day we could meet in China before their return to Germany.

Apart from that, on Monday we were happy enough not to notice anything of the big earthquake in China. We were at a company in Pudong / Shanghai holding a workshop and not even the ground did shake. Unfortunately, in other regions of China many people died or were injured. I guess you already read that in more details in the newspaper. Luckily it at least seems that all the people I know here are OK.

Paradise on earth?

In Chinese there is a saying: "There is paradise in heaven while on earth there is Suzhou and Hangzhou."
I had arrived in Shanghai last Sunday and had held a workshop with different people every day. The workshops still go on next week in this part of China which is why I staid in Shanghai over the weekend.
On Saturday I decided to go to Suzhou by train. Going by train in Shanghai is like going on a plane in Europe. You are not allowed to enter the station without a train ticket (tickets are usually sold next to the station) and only after a security check. Then you have to enter a waiting hall and when the loudspeakers announce that the check-in starts all passengers rush on the platform where the train is already waiting.
Suzhou was a real nice town. Rather small and easily accessible, it offered nice canals where you could take boat tours (the "gondoliere" even sang Chinese songs), Chinese landscape gardens (although unsurprisingly the most wellknown ones were damn crowded and not that good to visit, some small gardens were a positive surprise, e.g. the "Master-of-Nets Garden"), pagodas and an old town you could stroll around. I especially liked the old town (authentic) where children played in the streets, women washed their clothes in the canal and old men drank tea. Of course, living there is no easy life without the normal modern commodities. Washing clothes in the canals/rivers might look romantic to people from Western cities, but I also considered how dirty the water was and that it was real handwork done by women and female children only...
When I came back from Suzhou, I just passed the hotel where my parents were supposed to arrive on Saturday and wanted to leave them a message where and when we could meet, but when I entered the lobby, guess who walked down the stairs?
My parents! Their travel tour was doing a "Shanghai by night" tour and I decided to join. We visited the current tallest building of Shanghai (Jin Mao tower, 88 storeys) and went on top with the elevators. There we enjoyed the view over the Bund (the colonial area) and the TV tower (Oriental Pearl Tower). Next to Jin Mao tower they currently build a slightly taller building (nicknamed "bottle opener" because of its form), but the tallest inhabited structure of the world will still be the "101" in Taipei / Taiwan until the moment when the sheiks in Dubai will have finished their even taller building (probably 2009).
Many more night sights later (Bund, Nanjing Lu, Renmin Square with coloured fountain) the tour was finished.

Smog, heavy rain and other visits

Yesteray my parents arrived in Beijing. I showed them around a bit, but because of the May holidays Tianmen was crowded like never before. Just too many people! The heavy smog over the town disapeared today with heavy rain, thunder and lightning. So we went shopping and visited the architectural museum (well worth visiting with a miniature of Beijing in 1949 and more) instead of walking around in the rain.
In the afternoon when I went back to the hotel I had a very talkative taxi driver who while driving me around helped his daughter to move flat. So we drove to her old home first, loaded her bike and other belongings and took them with us. The taxi driver also asked me to talk to her on the phone to practice her English. That was fun! Apart from that he didn't believe me that the two persons with me in the cab had been my mum and dad. He told me they just looked too young... Well, mum and dad, you could be proud to hear that.

1st May holdiay excursion

In China on the 1st and 2nd of May we don't have to work because of national holiday. To be honest, nobody I asked knew why these two days are off apart from the fact that of course the 1st of May is workers' day.

We seized the opportunity to visit Hongluo si (Red conch temple) which used to be the centre of Northern Chinese buddhism. Now it is a wide area featuring some temples, gardens, a mountain, a 500 Arhat forest and an alpine slide (German: Sommerrodelbahn). Especially the last two sights were great. The 500 Arhat forest were five hundred statues of Buddha disciples standing in the forest wearing red capes. The alpine slide was not to be used individually, but in groups of five and a professional "alpine slider" (I don't know the official name of this profession :-)) sitting in the first "wagon" was the only one who could step on the brakes. It was just crazy how quickly our professional "alpine slider" drove us down the hill. What a fun!

Well, the transport there (over 2 hours standing in the bus because at 7am!!! already no seat was available) was less fun and the "3 star toilets" couldn't convince us neither. Yes, there is a star rating system for Chinese toilets, not only for hotels. (check http://www.thebeijingguide.com/toilets/chinese_toilets.html for some information on this system and on Chinese toilets in general if you're interested).

To have an impression of our excursion I attach some photos.