Living in China

Monday, July 21, 2008

Wedding in Hunan & trip to Inner Monolia

I've been touring around China for the past 3 weeks. First I went to my girlfriend's hometown for her brother's wedding, and we stayed a while in Dong Kou town with her family. Then we took a train (29 hours on a hard seat) to Inner Mongolia to visit the plains.

We had dinner at McConkey restaurant. Name sound familiar? ;)

Or what about the world famous TWYHDJ restaurant? Good food and draft beer 0,60 Eur!

This is Dong Kou; a small town in the mountains of Hunan province. It seemed that I was the only foreigner there, and people stared, but it wasn't too bad (I'm used to that by now).

We visited many relatives, who live in some small villages in the mountains...

And were overloaded with gifts. This big jerrycan is filled with home made fruit wine, which we enjoyed every day since then. Other local food is spicy dried tofu, dried pork (of which we took 2 kilos back home) and home made rice wine.

This is the house of Chen Yi's parents, and we stayed here 10 days. Her parents have some chickens and ducks, and every day one of them was killed and cooked. omg, I really stuffed myself in these 10 days. 3 huge meals every day, with a good glass of rice wine every time.

It was nice to escape the crazy noise and hot stuffy weather in Shanghai & Suzhou, and hang around in the mountains of Hunan for 2 weeks. I really needed a break.

The lucky couple

On the wedding day there was a massive meal, as there were 200+ guests...

who all shot firecrackers upon arrival. It is a tradition.

Lots of eating and drinking

On the day before the wedding we visited the bride's family...

and brought chicken and pork :)

Their house is in the mountains, surrounded by farms and rivers

little nephew

The bride's grandmother

I've never seen so much fireworks

The day before te wedding, 4:00 AM sharp, a pig was slaughtered

washed...

chopped up...

...and brought to the house. The price of this (fat) pig is 150 Euros

Snakes for sale in Changsha, the city we flew to before going to Chen Yi's hometown. Note the scissors and blood stains..

We did many fun and envirnomentally friendly activities, such as dynamite fishing

good fun

We also went swimming in the river, which was so cold because of the mountain water. The weather was really too hot to do anything else there.

After all the celebrations we took a long train to Baotou, to visit my friend who lives there. Unfortunaly, we couldn't stay very long, but still had a chance to walk around the town and eat some local delicacies.

Then we went to the plains of Inner Mongolia and drank horse milk wine.

It has been hard finding train tickets, I guess because of the summer holidays and the Beijing Olypmics. All the sleeper trains are booked full and even the seats were crowded. I am now in Hohhot (capital of Inner Mongolia) waiting for the train back home. We still cannot go directly to Shanghai, and so we have to go to another city first (Zhengzhou), on a hard seat again for 18 hours. Then, tomorrow, another long ride back home, where I have to take care of my visa stuff, and other boring things.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Yet another weekend in Shanghai

Some more cool pics from last weekend in Shanghai. I went to MoCa (Museum of Contemporary Art) ; a place I like to go. I've been there 3 times already, and every time I am impressed by the exhibitions there. There (already) was an exhibition of photographs of the earthquake in Sichuan. Pretty graphic stuff. Some young kids from art school were making drawings, based on the photos. It was very impressive.

There was also an exhibition of Thonik, a Dutch advertisement bureau. They exhibited ads for SP party and other things. Very strange seeing Dutch posters, newspapers and other items there.

Chen Yi with SP advertisement

Museum Thonik exhibition hall

Our dinner that night. Oh my god it was good! This is a typical Chinese meal; we ate this with 4 or 5 people, It is potatoes, fish, duck and cabbage. I don't think I want to have it any other way anymore now....

The Dutch queen over the years. This thing was on display in that museum. *(don't ask me why)

Oh Amsterdam

Our dinner on Saturday. It has been a long time since I ate any Western food. This was a cool and cheap restaurant, and hao chi (delicious) in a way. It was good for a change.

This young girl was drawing a sketch of a photograph of the Sichuan earthquake disaster.

I don't know what Jan Marijnnissen is doing here in Shanghai, but it was cool.

A drawing a child made of the Sichuan disaster; seen on TV.

Oriental Pearl Tower; Pudong, Shanghai

The tallest building in the world; now almost finished. The first time I saw this thing (2 years ago) it was only some scaffolding from a muddy pit.

May 12, the day of the disaster. All the Chinese people I know feel so sympathetic with the ones who have died in Sichuan. It is on TV all the time, and like this painting, little children paint paintings like these. This one was seen on TV a lot; it was a wake in Beijing with many candles to commemorate the dead of the earthquake in Sichuan. More than 60.000 people have died and everyone here is donating money and I even know some people who have gone there to help as volunteers; so this pic is a real image from TV.