My friends Bart and Esther (left on the picture) asked me to take a picture of them together with Esther’s brother and his girlfriend. They wanted to give this picture as a present to their grandma. Taking a good group picture is quite hard! I ended up combining three separate pictures to make just this reasonable one out of them…

Let’s just blame it on the models.

Click here for the three originals.

Arjen and Bin invited us to join them for the concert of John Gorka in Venlo. John Gorka is a fairly unknown Folk singer from America (youtube). I hadn’t heard of him before but Arjen and Bin have been fans for some years now. John performed solo on a small stage for about 70 people. Which gave the performance a nice and intimate ambiance.

I found time to edit the RAW China pictures and I have updated all the pictures on this blog with the edited new versions. I was travelling with my GPS logger, so you can also check where the pictures were taken on the map of the Picasaweb album.

Today is our last day in China, tomorrow morning we fly back to Holland. For our last day here Adrienne and I went to Zhujiajiao, a town close (1 hour bus drive) to Shanghai. With its canals it is known as a sort of Venice of China. I’m happy that the golden week is over, everything is much more quiet now and judging from the amount of tourist shops that they had in Zhujiajiao it can be awfully crowded there.

After a month in China there are some things I will miss and somethings I won’t.

Things I will miss:

• Chinese food, it’s great to go out and have a delicious meal for only a few euro’s
• Taxi’s, you can go everywhere you like by just waving at a Taxi driver (if you can explain where you want to go that is)
• Having all the food cooked for me and my room cleaned every day
• Fresh fruits and fruit juices; don’t think about the pesticides that were used
• The landscape and the country side; even though dirty it was very beautiful and interesting
• Adrienne will miss being “regular size” and blending in with the locals
• A new adventure every day
• The great hospitality of Bin’s family; ganbei!

Things I won’t miss:

• Spitting in the streets
• Talking on the phone at the volume and speed of a fighter jet
• Chinese food; noodles with dried shrimp for breakfast or seacucumber
• Public toilets; when standing in front of a urinal it is difficult to keep from slipping on whatever that stuff is on the floor
• Hotel staff that doesn’t understand one word of English
• Smogg, although it does help better against a sunburn than UV factor 50
• Bag bag, watch watch, looki looki!
• People staring at me and wanting to have their picture with me (liang mi!)

All in all I had a really great time here in China, it was a fantastic experience and I can recommend it to everybody that is a bit adventureous. But after this month in China I’m also happy to go back and see my family and friends again and most of all I really want a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast!

I just came back from eating some very spicy “hot pot”, so this isn’t going to be a very long story! The table next to us was enjoying a full portion of slimey pig brain.. Yum!

The last two days we spent in Ping’An to see the famous terraced rice fields there. Our hotel was on the top of the hill with a great view. Two local elderly ladies carried our luggage up as if it was nothing. I was ashamed to be sweating like crazy trying to keep up with them.

The harvesting of the rice had just begun so we missed the view of a totally golden mountain, but none the less it was very impressive. We stayed over night to see the sunset and sunrise. Due to the clouds and the smoke (the farmers were buring a lot of stuff) the view wasn’t perfect, but I was able to take some nice pictures. The pictures need some Photoshop and I took some HDR images, but this has to wait until I’m back.

-I have updated the pictures (19-10-2008)-

Tomorrow we leave for Shanghai, our final stop, to meet up again with Bin and Arjen.

Like yesterday we rented bikes and went around in the country side. We took less busy roads than yesterday. The pollution of the traffic on the main roads is horrible. Biking from Yangshuo to Fuli yesterday probably had the same impact as 50 years of hard core smoking.

The route we took today was amazing. The people in the rural areas here really live in very poor conditions, small huts with hardly any facilities. Much in contrast to their animals (water buffalo’s, chiken, ducks, dogs) which can walk around where ever they like and are well fed. Perhaps their end in the strange foods of the Chinese cuisine is not so nice, but their life is much better than even a “biological” chicken in Holland.

Tomorrow morning we leave for Ping ‘An where we will visit the terraced rice fields. We stay there for one night, and hopefully this time we will be able to see a nice sunrise the following day.