Well...long time no update! I know my mum's been worried because i've not updated, and there are others who are expressing concern too!
Its very nice to know i'm loved!
Anyway...let me think what i've been up to...
Firstly there was the National Day trip to Chengdu. National Day is held on the 1st October here. I'm still not sure what it actually commemorates, but it is a 3 day national holiday. Then, on the 3rd was Autumn Festival, which seems to mean that everyone eats Mooncakes and floats boats with candles in them in the river.
We went to Chengdu to see pandas, and see pandas we did!
Chengdu was really good, it was helpful because we could get Panda Cards – they are subsidised by the Government. After the Earthquake, the Government gave Chengdu a lot of money to rebuild, but they didn't need it all, so the decision was made to give back to the people by creating the Panda card. The Panda card costs 1Y (10p) and allows you free entry into the places showing the symbol. We got Panda cards on the first night we were there.
We got there on the Friday night, and stayed at a place called the Traffic Inn. We booked the place online, believing it was a Hostel, but when we got there, it turned out that we were actually in a hotel. It was very nice!
On the Saturday, we were originally planning to go to the Panda Sanctuary, but we got there too late to book it for the next day.
So, on Saturday we wandered about a bit, and then went to do some cultural things. Firstly, we went to a place called the Jengshu Archaelogical Site. This is where they found remains from centuries ago and they've created a whole visitors centre and tourist site out of it. It is very beautiful, the surrounding scenery was so pretty .
There was the main visitors centre, where the remains and the location of important objects was shown
,
and there was the museum, where they had recreated a village, it looked very very much like a Saxon village from England,.
It was really hard to work out the timescale of the place because time isn't measured in years in history, its measured in Dynasties, so if you don't know Chinese history, then time is really hard to fathom!
We also went to Dufu's Thatched Cottage, which is a place where the Chinese poet Dufu took himself to live away from civilisation.
He built a thatched cottage and stayed there and wrote. He also cultivated a medicinal garden and beautiful scenery.
And what are these you may ask!
That's right...Fish...lots and lots of fish...Don't show Sharkie and Mickey Finn, they might start getting ideas of sizes to grow to...
Like this one...This size of goldfish (and Koi Carp) seems to be the norm here. There is a difference, this is a Koi Carp, not a goldfish, but still, I don't want mine getting any ideas about outgrowing their tank!!
During the visit to Dufu's Cottage, it started to rain...really, properly rain! So we decided to try to get back to the hotel. By the time we got there, we were absolutely soaked to the skin! It was the first real rain we'd seen, so the first few minutes were quite refreshing, but after that, it didn't stop. It was like a heavy thunderstorm, but without the thunder and lightning!
Saturday night, we met up with some of Alison's friends from her previous time in China. They were interesting people, one of them was Korean and kept talking about how learning to speak Mandarin had completely ruined her intonation in Korean. If Korean's anything like Mandarin, the intonation can mean the difference between understanding and gibberish.
Very early Sunday morning, we went to the Panda Sanctuary. It was wonderful! There were real Pandas!! They were gorgeous animals, and not as big as I thought they were, and a lot more lazy! There were the 'Pandas Asleep' ,
and the 'Pandas in Heaven'.
This panda literally had a blanket of bamboo!
I really really loved my video camera that day, it has a 60x optical zoom, so I was getting telephoto shots without having a massive lens. I love my video camera!
The Panda Sanctuary was really interesting, but I did feel that we were rushed around a lot of it. Sadly because of its tourist potential, it did suffer from the money grabbing side of China. We looked around a lot of the adult Panda enclosures quite quickly, but when it got to the bit where we could pay to hold a baby panda, or have photos taken with them, we were kept there for ages! Presumably, it was to tempt us into paying (400y, or £40 for a picture with adult pandas, and 1000Y, or £100 for a picture with a baby). I don't believe in that kind of thing, I don't like seeing wild animals being used for tourist entertainment, so I carried on wandering around. As well as black and white, or traditional pandas, there were also red pandas. These are really cute and they're about the same size as Finlay (small-medium dog), and they had a lot of character. When we were looking at them, their enclosures were being cleaned, and they were sticking their noses in the baskets of cloths and cleaning materials, chasing the brooms and making nuisances of themselves.
Sadly, I can't get the videos from my video camera on here, I think I need to burn them to DVD first, and then convert that to something that can be used.
After the Panda Sanctuary, we went back to the Hotel. I went to get something to eat, whilst some of the others went to a western restaurant, and others went to nap. In the afternoon, we visited the SongXianChuanDong (I think) Ancient Craft Market Town. It was more like a large antiques market, complete with Antique prices!! I did buy a bracelet with a dragon and phoenix on it, and I managed to get him down to 40% of the original price. Alison wasn't impressed because I learn from Dad how to deal with these situations, and people, and I did a better job then her...
After that, we went to the Burial Place of Liung Bei, a former emperor of China. It was basically a large mound of earth that everyone walked around...There was a beautiful Bonsai tree garden there though, which was nice.
We also visited a temple (I forget which one), and it was as decorated and attractive as every other temple. This one was a Daoist Temple. I've not yet worked out the difference, the Daoist temples still have statues of Buddha in various positions.
It is rare that I take pictures in temples, I don't like doing it, it just feels wrong somehow.
Chengdu was an interesting trip from start to finish, We went there on the bus, which took 3 hours, and then we came back by train, which took 4 hours. This seems odd...in the UK, a bus is never faster than a train, but here, it is the other way round, the train stops at each station for about 15 minutes, if not longer and then seems to randomly stop between stations for 10-30 minutes at a time. The train is definitely an experience that an traveller should have! It was like a travelling buffet! We got on the train, and we had tickets for seats, so we got to our seats t find that a family was sitting there. We turfed them out and got comfortable. I got my book out, MP3 player in, and I was set to go. The family shuffled over and sat on 3 seats (about 8 of them...) and then proceeded to unpack...i am sure that for the whole 4 hours journey, they didn't stop eating!! we had some snacks, but they had instant noodles, and sunflower seeds, and peanuts and cakes...
Eventually, we got back to Hechuan, and I went to bed. I'd managed to pick up a nice cold! I stayed in bed for 2 days, and had 4 people tell me that I should go to the doctor and get medicine...they have the belief here that if you have a cold for 3 days, you need to go to hospital to get a drip fitted. I don't know what's in the drip, and I didn't want to find out either...i stayed in bed and drank whisky and felt a lot better!
After the National Day holiday, it was back to work as normal. I teach 7 classes a week, some of them are 2 hours, some are 3 hours. Each period is 40 minutes long, and then there is a 10 minute break, and then the next period starts. My speaking classes are 2 periods long, and the listening ones are 3 periods long.
Last weekend, we went to Chongqing City. We stayed at Tina's Hostel again. I met a girl called Margot there, she's Dutch and works on cruise ships. We went out for the evening and went to The Outside Bar again, where I met up with people from CQExpat. It was a good evening, and we trawled a few bars.
The others went to a football match, but I had other plans: The Knitting Supplies Market. I was wool heaven!! There were hundred of different types of yarn. I think i got overcharged on one of the wools that I bought, but I bought 10 skeins (which I think means that its about 1500m), and its a thick/thin orange, pink and red yarn that I think is silk. I'm not sure because the only way to test is to burn a piece and it burns like wool (no flame, no melting), but it doesn't smell like burning wool (burning hair), so I think its silk. It cost me 200Y (£20) which is cheap in the UK, but I think it was expensive here. I got some other skeins of bulky wool which cost me £1 per skein, and I think there's about 120m in each skein, so that price more than made up for the expensive wool! It was interesting shopping at the Knitting Market, but it was so difficult too!! Not speaking very much Chinese, I couldn't find out how long the skeins were, so it was all guesswork to buy the right amount!! The only length they could give me was to show me scarves knitted using one skein, and I had to guess from there. I bought some super chunky cotton yarn, and I bought twice as much as I needed for the top that I wanted to make out of it, because I guessed wrong... I do have a wool supplier in Hechuan as well now. I saw the shop a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn't work out how much the wool was, or even whether they sold wool, because although there was loads on the shelf, they kept showing me completed articles and pointing to a knitting machine at the back. Eventually, I took Sawyer with me and we worked out that I can buy wool there, but no-one seems to know the length. I did find it amusing because when I tested the yarn at home, it turns out to be pure wool, but there were telling me that its not good enough quality to make gloves out of...Again, I got about 120m/skein, but this place is only 5Y (50p) per skein. I've got lots of skeins to ball now...I've made a top (from the super chunky), and i'm waiting for my shopping buddy to get back so that I can go and get a zip and some material for it!
I never told you all about the mobile phone shopping experience!!
When I got here, I decided that it was going to be easier to get a Chinese mobile phone rather than get mine unlocked and start playing with sim cards. So, Sawyer took me to the mobile phone shop and it was an experience!! I chose the phone I wanted ( a very girl Hello Kitty phone in purple...) and then we registered it to Sawyer's ID card (they couldn't use my passport because i'm not a Chinese national). Then, we paid for it, and had a choice of free gifts....washing powder or a tea flask...the most random things to go with a mobile! I went for the tea flask because I wanted something to put milk in in the fridge...
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1 comment:
Glad your okay and having a good time, I was worried! :)
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