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"...