Hi and welcome to my blog site.
Hi All,
Well it's been a long time since i wrote in my blog (Feb) i have been back in the UK for the last 9 months, and as i said in my last blog i stayed on expecting to go in to hospital in February for a shoulder operation,that was postponed till end of April. Jun went back in January and had to complete the task of packing in our previous apartment in the BDA area (south Beijing) and moving to our new one that we bought in Tong Zhou district ( east Beijing) and setting it all up, all of which she managed to do marvelously, as well as having to start work in a new department of China Customs at the same time.
Well after 3 months in England I am now back in China, I left the UK at 8am Monday the 15th of September and arrived in Beijing at 3.30pm Tuesday the 16th ( with the 7 hour time difference) I was very tired and to make it worse Jun and I missed each other as I came through the arrivals gate, my phone had stopped working as soon as i left the UK so I couldn't call her and just assumed she hadn't been able to get away from work early to meet me, so I stood at the far end of the arrival gate for 1.5 hours. Meanwhile Jun is at the other end of the arrival area ( it is a huge area) trying to contact me and wondering why I hadn't replied to her texts that she sent me when i was on a stopover at Dubai and naturally thinking something had happened and I had either missed the flight from Newcastle or something had happened on route. I didn't dare move from my position in case I missed her and Jun was thinking the same,eventually she made her way to the information desk to check if i had been on the flight when she spotted me stood at the far end looking like in her words " dead on my feet and completely lost" ha-ha. Anyway it was all ok in the end and we got home at 7pm.
Hi everyone,
We had a lovely day out last Friday as it was the May Day holidays so Jun was off Thursday and Friday,but she had to go back to work on Sunday to make up for one of the days ( you don't get to many days from the government) We went to Tianjin which is a large city close to the coast by bullet train which reached a speed of 290 km an hour ( the world zipped by),they are beautiful modern trains very comfortable and smooth. Tianjin is a lovely city and very different to Beijing with a less frenzied feel and a large river running right through it down to the coast and a very large seaport,with ferries running to Japan and Korea. In fact looking up and down the river and at the buildings including their own golden eye,bridges and a Catholic Church you would think you were in London. There is one lovely bridge called Liberation bridge built by the French in 1903,and you can take boat rides from there up and down the river even going as far as the seaport although that one is an 8 hour round trip.
I find it strange though that if you travel by train you have to show your ID if you are Chinese, or in my case as a foreigner my passport in order to purchase a ticket yet i could drive our car there or take a coach without showing anything to anyone.I was talking to a Asian American couple in the queue who had asked me if they could get a ticket with other ID i.e a driving licence as they had not brought their passports with them,which of course they couldn,t so they had to cancel their trip. We asked if we could get tickets on the next train to leave which was at 11.05 but the booking clerk said no it was sold out so the next one was at 1.05. We were sat in the station waiting and watching the busy world go by and happened to check our tickets at about 12 o clock and discovered she had booked us on the 11.05 which of course had long since left so we had to go back cancel those tickets and get the last two seats on the 1.05 (only in China ha-ha).
We had a long walk through a very large Antique Market before going over to the area known as the Five Avenues which is where all the foreign delegations lived and is full of old preserved colonial buildings.Some are now private houses,restaurants,offices or empty awaiting refurbishment,plus two that have been converted in to visitor attractions with all the walls inside and out covered in porcelain and many other decorative furnishings.
We walked about till about 6 then went for something to eat and then made our way back to the river area near the station with lots of people walking about,taking photographs, selling goods on the pavements,and releasing loads of lanterns.We then caught the last train back at 10 o clock and just made the last bus from Beijing station back home arriving at 11.30 feeling very tired ha-ha.
There is a lot of history attached to Tianjin It was Tianjin port that the Western countries using as an excuse the alleged boarding of a British ship by the Chinese surrounded the area with gunboats and made them sign the treaty of Tianjin of 1856 which gave them access to nine concessionary bases on the mainland from which they could conduct trade and sell opium.This created lots of ill feeling and in 1870 a Chinese mob attacked a French Orphanage killing the Priests and Nuns believing that the orphans were being kidnapped and eaten by the foreigners.As a result 20 Chinese were beheaded and peace restored until the Boxer rebellion of 1900.
Hi Everyone,
I hope the weather has started to improve back in the UK,we as you know had a terrible time recently with the smog it lasted 10 days and apparently the WHO states that the safety limit is 2.5 microns per cubic metre and during those days it was averaging 505 and one day reached 700,you might as well suck on a exhaust pipe ha-ha.But recently we have had some lovely warm,blue sky days and it is so nice to go for a walk in the parks and see Spring arriving.
I went and had a look at that old house the other week which is reputed to be haunted,it was built in 1900 in the colonial style originally to be a church,but became a house instead and was owned by a high ranking official in the Manchurian Government and when the Communists took over in 1949 he fled to Taiwan leaving behind his family and the story goes that one of his concubines was so distraught she hung herself in the house and the legend has it that on stormy nights or full moon nights you can hear her crying. Anyway as i said i had a good look around and took some photos,it is in a bad condition now and they say that at least twice before they tried to demolish it as it is in a prime location,and again legend says the last time it was halted when some workers mysteriously disappeared.So now no one will work on it and the Gov't have gave it a kind of unofficial listed building status.
I had a day out last week with Andy a friend of mine I met over here, he is a photographer and also married to a Chinese woman. We spent the day at the Heaven Temple and Parks,it's a grand place with loads of history where emperors of the past offered Taoist offerings for good harvests for the coming year, it was built in 1420, I think we walked for nearly 5 hours but it was a lovely day, quite warm and it was nice to be taking photos with someone else.I still like visiting old derelict places though,I found a great one the other week it was an abandoned small factory and i got in and wandered around taking some interesting shots,then later thinking if i had a accident in there no one would know,so that was a bit sobering ha-ha.
I have been watching all the news reports on that missing plane from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing I find it incredible that it could just disappear like that,it seems it was deliberately turned around and the transponders were disabled by someone on board ,and what makes it even more personal is that Jun and I were on that same flight last Summer returning from our trip to Indonesia and Malaysia.
I have wrote on other occasions about how many Chinese children seem to be over protected and allowed to have their own way to much creating a kind of me-me culture that gives rise to very self centered competitive people,the Chinese policy of one child probably goes a long way towards explaining it,and I was very much reminded of it again today when one of my young students aged 6 who has two lessons a week with me,was here this morning.At the end of the lesson I usually like to do something different with them just to break up the lesson play a game or something.Today i showed him a small game where a page is covered in dots and the aim is to draw one line each and the one who completes a square takes it with the one with the most squares being the winner.Well I took the first three squares and he burst out crying saying to Jun "billy is winning it's not fair,i feel shame" and after was inconsolable.I said to Jun later that kind of behaviour has to be changed for his own future good.
We will be traveling back to the UK sometime middle of June staying till July then Jun goes back to China and I will stay on for another 2 months or so finishing off decorating and furnishing the house,but we haven't booked the flights yet so its still a bit uncertain on the exact days.
Hi
Well it's the end of the Chinese New Year celebrations now most people are back at work tomorrow 10th of Feb as are the school children. Jun had to go back last Friday and work Saturday, as well as working some of the other weekend before the holidays.
We did go out a couple of times to visit areas as well as a few walks in the local parks.. and we got some snow the other day which ended nearly 4 months of dryness, but it is still very cold. The first day we visited the Hutongs and Markets at Liulichang in Beijing, it was very quiet walking through the old alleyways, the houses don't have toilets and the local residents have to use communal toilet blocks scattered around the area. But it was unbelievable when we came out of the almost deserted alleyways in to the market areas and confronted a solid mass of people. Later we went in to a restaurant for lunch and the staff were literally run off their feet, we observed a couple of the young girls becoming very upset as they had not had a break for hours, one was on the verge of tears. Eventually we got a table and we ordered our food and a short time later they brought us some sweet pancakes we told them we hadn't ordered them and it turned out it was the previous people at the table, either they forgot or just didn't want to wait any longer ha-ha.
Later we got off the main market roads back in to some of the alleyways and we came across this old guy with his bike and some small birds tethered to his bike, he released one of them after asking me to hold up a 1yuan note ( 10p),the bird flew onto my hand picked the note out of my fingers and flew to the old guy and gave it to him, he then opened a small box on his bike and put it in the box and the bird promptly flew down opened the box retrieved the note and gave it back to him again.
Another day we went to a large park called Lung Tan Hu as we had found out that there was an abandoned amusement park close to it and I wanted to explore it, we spent an hour or so in Lung Tan which again was very busy but it was a nice holiday atmosphere, we then went to a local kiosk for pancakes then had some local food in a small café for local people which was packed solid. We then went in search of a way in to the amusement park and were lucky to find that an area at the main entrance was being used as a overspill car park so we just walked in and started to walk around the dried up lakeside as the actual park is on an island which had 4 bridges leading in to it.However the bridges were sealed off with steel plates but as the lake was dried up we climbed down and crossed over and just climbed back up the other side. To say that it was eerie would be an understatement, there was a strong wind blowing and the 180 feet big wheel was making loud groaning noises as it slowly turned around, torn sheets were flapping and blowing out of buildings and windows. I found a large building with a roller door partly open so went inside, the first thing I noticed was the shadow of the pods on the big wheel moving down the wall followed by a door banging very loudly. I took some quick shots and left, later we came across a pile of abandoned pleasure boats all with duck heads on the bows with some of them broken off lying on the floor almost like a graveyard a very melancholic feel to it, but a great place to explore and we thoroughly enjoyed it, even bumping in to a young Chinese student as we were leaving who had the same idea as us. You can see some of the images in my website here in the set titled "abandoned things", our next one is a supposedly haunted 19th century house, should be interesting.