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.