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!

After taking one extra day rest and some strange Chinese pills the receptionist gave me against diarrhoea  we felt up to task of climbing the 6600 steps of the holy mount Tài Shān. We were lucky that it was an overcast and so very hot day. The way up the mountain was very nice, the whole path is carved out of the rocks as huge stairs and all along the route you find temples and calligraphy written hundreds of years ago into the rocks of mount Tai.

After climbing for about seven hours we reached the top of the mountain completely wet of sweat. Since we wanted to spend one night at the top of the mountain to see “the best sunrise in the world” we started looking for a hotel.  After declining two hotels for their poor sanitary facilities (which you will find important after spending the last three days on the toilet) we found a reasonable one where we spent the night.

In the morning at 5am we got up to see the famed sunrise. With my camera mounted on my tripod we headed out in to…. the mist… A thick fog had gathered on top of the mountain and the visibility was about 10 meters. Perhaps we should have burned some incense at those temples the day before it seems that luck is not with us on this trip. Even though there was no sunrise to see for us, I was able to make some very nice pictures of the temples in the fog, but unfortunately I used the custom setting on my camera that I programmed to take only RAW images. This means that I can’t upload the pictures to my website because they are not in JPG format and the computer here at the receptiondesk obviously has no RAW converter. When hand-holding the camera I used the other settings so I still could upload some fog pictures just to give you an impression. -In the mean time these pictures have been added-

It’s been a while since I had an internet connection so there is a lot to write, but there is little time because Bin’s father is picking us up in 20 minutes for dinner (I’m still full from lunch).

The day after the notorious ganbei incident Adrienne (who didn’t drink a sip of alcohol) got very heavy cramps. After a couple of hours of a lot of pain we decided to call Bin’s uncle who is a very high offical for the horspitals in Yantai. He came together with a doctor who diagnosed some intestinal infection caused by the seafood we consumed the night before. Adrienne had to come a long to a clinic (the hospital was too far away) for an infusion with some (who knows what kind of) medication. Everything was arranged very fast and after getting the infusion she was luckily feeling already a lot better.

We spend the rest of the day lying in bed feeling not so well. The family of Bin apologized over and over again for having all of so sick. Of course it was not their fault and after all this whole adventure is one we will not soon forget.

The next day we left for Tai’an where we would climb the famous holy mountain Taishan. A 6600 step monster.

The day that we would actually climb the mountain however we were both feeling not so well again (read 10 minute interval between toilet visits). In this state we could of course not climb the mountain. Bin’s aunt was however so helpful that she moved our flight to Shanghai one day so that we could climb the mountain a day later. Which we did…

We arrived in Yantai yesterday to visit the family of Bin who is travelling with us. Her uncle arranged the best possible Chinese dinner for us in a very exclusive place. At the dinner were me, Adrienne, Maarten, Arjen, Bin, Bin’s two uncles and aunts and a special guest the chief of running water from Yantai.

I have never eaten so many different and strange things. The worst of all were (and I can feel a lump in my throat even when I type this) pigfeet, chicken feet and worst of all (and most exclusive and expensive of all apparently) was Sea Cucumber, a very awful substance with hardly any taste and it really looks horrific (the dark green long thing in the picture).

It is also very common to make toasts at the dinner table, after such a toast the Chinese shout “Ganbei!” and you have to finish your glass at once.. “Bottoms up”. For this special occasion the uncle of Bin had opened a 50 year old very special wine. Which is strange because no one tastes the wine, but they just shout Ganbei and away it goes!

Not wanting to be insulting to their culture me and Arjen joined them with their Ganbei’s and we all had speeches of our own. I can say without a doubt that in my entire life (including the notorious introduction week at the university) I have never ever drank so much alcohol! After returning home to the hotel I spent the entire night on the toilet while the room was spinning like crazy. Arjen even had to be carried home after vomiting all over the nice and shiney white Honda of Bin’s aunt. I spent most of the next day lying in bed feeling awful, just as Arjen.

Bin’s family apologized for having us drink so much, but I must say that this was an experience I will never forget!

Tomorrow Adrienne and me are going to fly to Jinan, for this we have to get up at 4.30am… Happy times!

Ganbei!

Yesterday we visited the Great Wall at Mutianyu. It was quite a bus trip and taxi drive to go there from Beijing (about 2.30hours in total). The walk on the wall and the view was magnificent. Since Mutianyu is this remote, most of the tourists don’t go there. They visit the wall at Badaling, which was like Disneyland according to some websites on the internet. (Check out the funny sign we had to read before we were allowed to get on the wall) The sun was very bright which made me sweat so much that I could almost swim down! Apart from that it also makes the pictures look a bit flat. (By the way all the pictures I post here about China are small JPG’s unedited straight from the camera. I hope that with some postprocessing of the RAW files they will look a lot better already, but this is something I will do when I’m back in Holland.)
Going down from the wall was a lot of fun, you could slide down on a toboggan, much like the way the ancient Chinese did in the end of the 16th century after finishing the wall…

(Safety is one of the first priorities here in China. Check out the third brake light which nicely lit up the interior of our taxi every time it braked)

After our trip to the great wall we went to see a Chinese Opera. Our western ears are really not made to endure this kind of torture! I have never heard anything like this in my whole life. Click on the wikipedia link above and listen to the audio samples, I guess they give you an idea (I can’t listen to them here since they are blocked). Everything was in Chinese and we were not able to make any sense out of the story that was depicted. But all in all it was a lot of fun to see the performance, and even more to see audience go wild after the actors squeeked out some very high notes.

Today was our last day in Beijing, tomorrow we will leave (at 5.20am!) for Yantai to vistit the family of Bin. I hope that I will have the possibility to access the internet there as well. Good night!

This morning we visited the Lama Temple here in Beijing. It is a nice temple with an enormous amount of buddahs and people worshipping them by burning a huge amount of incense sticks. By saying a huge amount I really mean a HUGE amount. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if 95% of the pollution here in Beijing is caused by it.

After visiting this temple we went for a walk through the hutongs. These old and authentic small and narrow streets have a great atmosphere. I really enjoy walking through them and I hope I will have some more time for making portraits of the people living in them. But time is short and we leave very early this Saturday to Shanghai.

In the evening we went to a Kung Fu show called The Legend of Kung Fu. It was a nice and entertaining show which was a bit in between ballet and Kung Fu. But unfortiunately “sir, no photo no photo, thank you, no photo”…

Today we went to the Summer Palace. It was a clowdy day and quite foggy. But nontheless the site was marvelous. The temples and the surroundings were very nice. There were also by far not so many tourists as in the forbidden city. Afterwards we had a very nice dinner in a classy restaurant. Six different dishes for less than 3 euro’s per person. Really amazing!