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!

We (Arjen, Bin, Arjen’s father, Adrienne and me) are having a nice and busy time here in Beijing. We arrived on Sunday the 14th and walked around the city. We had lunch in a place that served “BT Chicken Wings” that were said to be notoriously spicey. After taking a couple of bites Arjen said “these are not so spicey at all”. 10 seconds later tears were running down his sweaty face. I guess when the Chinese say that something is very spicey, it is extremely spice and probably needs to be handled as a chemical weapon.

A day later we went had breakfast in a small “restaurant” in one of the Hutongs (old streets of the city), it was quite good food and the price was 13 RMB, which is 1.30euro’s for the five of us! Afterwards we went to the Forbidden City. A nice and huge site, but also very touristy and crowded.

Check out the barbeque’d scorpions and seahorses. We haven’t tried them yet…

I usually try to be the first one to check in online for a flight so that I can have an emergency exit row seat (I’m 2 meters tall so a normal seat is very cramped). As always I went to the KLM website a bit more than 24 hours before the flight. I tried to check in the flight but as usual (before 24h) it gave some error, so I didn’t really mind and waited until it was 24h before my flight. Instead of giving me the check in website it told me “Your flight has departed.”. Whaaaaat!?! For some strange reason I thought my flight would leave the 10th instead of the 9th! I must have mixed up the arrival date with the departure date or something! In a big stress I called the KLM/NWA hot line. After waiting for 30 minutes I finally got a hold of one of their agents who connected me through to another agent. Again I had to wait another 15 stressful minutes. This agent told me I forfeited the flight by not showing up. I had no right for a new ticket and would have to buy a new one (costing over $1600,-). I was shocked and asked her what to do. She was kind enough to talk to her supervisor and in the end could come to an agreement that I could get a ticket for the next day for “only” $250,-. I of course took the offer and am now writing this message from my couch at home.

On my last day in New York I went to Brooklyn to have a look at the bridge.

Two more days and I leave for my holiday to China… Will the jetlag ever end…