Today we walked over the bazar in the islamic section of Xi’an. Here they sell delicious foods, such as goat heads, lamb feet, kidney shiskebabs (with flies) and more specialties. To spare myself of some more happy times on the toilet I have kindly passed on those!

 

Yesterday our guide Henry took us to the famous Terracotta army. It is “golden week” here in China, which means that generally speaking everybody in the whole country has a week off from work. In Holland with our 16 million inhabitants we found it smart to spread our countries holidays such that not everybody would be off at the same time. To me it is a mystery why a country with over 1.3 billion inhabitants could not come up with a similar idea.

The golden week could just as well have been translated as “sea of black”, which is basically what I see around me the entire day, looking down on the huge amounts of Chinese everywhere.

My Chinese name has become ”Liang Mi”, which means two meters. Luckily with those two meters I can easily look over the crowds and still take pictures of the sights.

The terracotta army was really amazing. The hundreds of warriors that they have dug up (there are still thousands under the ground) are impressive. Each warrior is very detailed and every single one of them looks different.

We are very happy with our guide who’s English is very good and enthusiastically explains everything about the places we visit. Without him this trip would have been only half as interesting.

 

Adrienne and me were walking through Shanghai yesterday following two routes from the Shanghai Lonely Planet that my Professor lent me for this trip. We were getting a bit disappointed about the sights, everything was very western and not so many strange things to see. The people selling “watch watch, bag bag, looki looki” were also getting on our nerves (at the end of the day exactly 50 people asked us for the bag bags!).

There was however one thing that made up for everything… The insect market. A huge market where people were selling strange insects. When we took a closer look we found out that they were selling thousands and thousands of crickets! We looked around astonished. After I saw a sort of “cage fight” dvd with crickets playing there, I found out that they were used for cricket fights. Large crowds of Chinese people were “testing” the poor bugs by provoking them with special straws and looking very seriously at how they would react. Try to imagine the noise in this place with millions of crickets chirping around! It was really a great experience.

Today we (Arjen, Adrienne and me) arrived in Xi’an and for the following two days we will have the tour guide “Henry” who Adrienne’s parents recommended, guide us around.

 

We arrived in Shanghai yesterday after returning from mount Taishan (by cable cart and bus), to reunite with Arjen, Bin and Maarten, and to visit Bin’s father.

We both feel a lot better, no more diarrhoea, on the contrary, there hasn’t been anything for over three days now. I fear the worst for Shanghai’s sewage system once this sea cucumber drops, since in some places it already has a hard time flushing down some toilet paper…

We haven’t had a lot of time yet to look around here in Shanghai. We arrived late yesterday and went to see the famous skyline of Shanghai. Today Bin’s father took us to Hongzhou, at a 3 hour drive from Shanghai it is supposed to be one of the most famous touristic places in China (for the Chinese). When we got there however it was raining hard and everything looked gray. We took a boat ride over the lake but quickly returned to a very high class restaurant where Bin’s father treated us to the entire menu.

On the way back Bin had to slap her father regularly and put Tiger Balm on his forehead to keep him from falling asleep! After a while he started hitting his own head with a Coke bottle and soon afterwards pulled over in the middle of the highway exit (right on these white stripes in front of the exit sign) to get some fresh air and have a sigarette. We did make it back to the hotel however after which I wrote the first story of today about Adrienne’s hospital visit.

In the evening Bin’s father took us all out to a 12 course dinner. Still full from the lunch we dug in. We refrained from drinking alcohol and toasted with orange juice instead. I can tell you Ganbei’ing (remember this is finishing the glass in one go) a glass of orange juice isn’t all that much fun either. Arjen’s father got a huge vase as a present to take home with him to Holland tomorrow (he won’t be joining us for the rest of our trip). I wonder how he will get it home in one piece.

PS I would like to thank the people who left a comment. It is really nice to hear from you guys!