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!