Longjing tea

Today I received a long expected packet from my Chinese friends Jia and Yilin (the one I toured Tibet with). During the trip I was surprised that they weren't drinking tea and asked why. They answered me that they didn't like Tibetan tea and preferred Longjing tea from Hangzhou. They promised me to send some so I would understand why :).
This morning I got the packet after 3 weeks and got 2 giant luxury boxes of 2 packs of tea showed here:


Well I'm no expert in tea but the tea leaves are from a nice green color, every single of them in perfect shape for sure manually processed, 2 cm long and not dried, and it tastes great :). I think it's gonna enter in my list of common drinks as did the Turkish coffee with cardamom when I arrived in Israel and rum, well I can't remember when ;).
There is no bug in this picture but you can see me hiding somewhere on it, looking at the higher res version is required though to find where I hide.

Panda !

We went early morning to visit the Giant Panda Breeding Research Center in Chengdu, and we enjoyed the sight of those lazy @#$es eating bamboo all day and their cuuuuuuuute babies playing around. Evgeni couldn't resist and payed what was needed to hold a baby in his arms (and get pictured doing it).



Let me badmouth pandas a bit. It has the stomach like other bears, made to digest meat. However it is lazy, really lazy, but very clever : meat runs bamboo doesn't let's eat bamboo. However because bamboo is not meat it only digests 3% of it. Solution ? Eat more bamboo, up to 15kg a day, and save energy as much as possible by having 12 hours a day of naps. So you would think that this explains why it is disappearing ? Nahhh, on the 1000 kinds of bamboo it accepts to eat 25. And as if being picky about food wasn't enough, it's picky about girls. Giant Pandas have really hard time finding the perfect partner. "Enough", I hear you say, well that's not all, baby pandas are born half developped (premature compared to most mammals), and that 200g thing is very fragile, so fragile that barely half survive even with an army of chinese doctor watching them. Finally mothers have pretty low maternal instinct and it usually takes them a few babies to figure what to do with it. So now you understand why it's disappearing (ok I agree that overpopulation in China is kinda helping as well). But it's so CUUUUUUUUUUTE !



We spent the rest of the day visiting the science and industry museum and the "computer street" (Akihabara or Mongallet in Chengdu).



I spent all the evening at the hostel drinking beer listening to an old french routard playing with a guitar and singing all the classic french songs (From Brel to Noir Desir with a lot of Renaud and Brassens). A young french couple joined us and we chatted all night :). It felt good.

Chengdu

The rain is definitively tracking us, Chengdu was gray and rainy when we arrived, however it didnt really last so we visited a Boudhist Zen temple and the center of the city. The city is ultra-modern, full of banks (more than in Beijing it seems) and most of the 2 wheelers have an electric engine which is scary for pedestrians because you don't hear them come as they are even more silent than a standard chinese bike. We also met that guy downtown:

Lijiang

After a lazy morning we took the noon bus to Lijiang. The road was really nice but unfortunately there was still a layer of clouds around 4000m hiding the snowy peaks supposed to surround us. The hostel we went to had a really nice view towards the old city of Lijiang. The old city is beautiful, however it is now entirely dedicated to tourism. The little streets are full of pricy restaurants and souvenirs shops.






Naxi girls

The evening got rainy, disrupting our plans to go hike in the tiger leaping gorge the next days, and finaly the cheap ticket prices for the next day and really expensive ones for the rest of the week helped us making our mind. So it's not that Lijiang wasn't nice, but we decided to move to Chengdu the next day.

Dali

We arrived early in the morning in Dali and took a cab
to the old town. Unfortunately the weather wasn't still
at its best and the suposedly stunning scenary was
remaining under cover.
We rented bikes and went around to watch the 3
pagodas, climb to a boudhist temple and go down near
the lake. The city is nearly at 2000m and the
surrounding mountains at 4000m. The sun showed himself
enough so we can enjoy a bit of the scenary and get
nicely sunburnt :).



We wandered all around the nice old city, took a lot
of pictures, had once again great food, and came back
to our hostel to prepare the next day trip to Lijiang.

On the way to Yunan

We had a last round of shopping :) in Yangshuo (baught
some warm cloth as it seems it'll be cold for all our
trip and some flash for the camera). We got a ride
back to Guilin airport where our plane to Kunming was
delayed (they were fixing one engine:).
We managed to get a bed in the night train to Dali and
killed time in a small restaurant not far from the
train station. It took us 45 min to order as noone
was speaking a single word of english but we ended up
with really good food.
The neighbourhood of the train station was like most
trainstation end up in most of the places... quite
unfriendly, Evgeni was almst running despite his 30kg
load to try to avoid kids and beggars.
In the train we chatted for a few hours with an old
painter from Beijing that was on a trip around the
country to find inspiration. He showed us the thousand
of pictures he took already of which some will become
very nice oil paintings.The man had been around the
world and was a very interresting character.

Yangshuo

We did a bike ride to the next town, then took a bamboo boat ride from a nearby village back. The scenary was fantastic and the ride nice but the weather was freezing cold (windy and 10 ish), we were almost happy to have to ride the bike again just to get warm. We got a bit scared the first time our boat went down one of these one meter wall (the bamboo raft was barely above water with the two of us two bikes and the girl steering it).








On the way back home we tasted a few fruits at the local market and went for some shopping before dinner. I couldn't resist and finally tryed dog meat (not much to be said about it though, not great not bad).
Tomorrow afternoon we're leaving for Kunming then Dali.

Arriving in Yangshuo

Long long day,we took the plane to Guilin from Beijing at 7:30 and arriving 2:30 before the flight wasn't really needed :) but we wanted to be on the safe side. Then a long car ride to Yangshou where we learn that the moonsoon started ... yesterday :(, the temperature dropped from 28 to 9... Well despite the gray and rainy weather I admit that the scenaries here are some of the most incredible I have ever been given to see. I'll flood you with pictures of limestone spikes covered by forest and just above peaceful rivers and ricefields.


I start to like it here :), unlike Madras on the beach where I attracted swarms of young boys that want to be on a picture with me, here it's swarm of young girls !!! We'll see if they send me the pictures :).


We met some Israelis downtown that recognized us as israelis (still have to figure it out how, guess is that our backpacks gave us) and invited us this evening for Pessah's Seder. We joined in and the dinner was quite enjoyable.

Forbidden City

Evgeni's birthday :) 26.
We went all around the forbidden city, Tienanmen square, we missed Mao's corpse as it's closed sundays though ;), then we visited the summer palace and finished by an evening at a chinese opera. Pretty busy day as you see, it's easier to describe how we were tired than how we were amazed by everything we saw. The chinese emperors definitely had taste (and not only for young girls).

The Forbidden city


Tienanmen under not that heavy surveillance :/.


The duck


The summer garden


The opera

One of the hard task of this trip is to dodge all the tourist traps that you attract like a magnet. From fake watches, to fake paintings, through scenic taxi rides and guides with an accent while speaking english that would make Jacques Delors cry.
We also had a birthday lunch at a fancy Pekin duck restaurant, yummee.

Great Wall

En route for the great wall ! We picked up the tour that looked like the least crowded one and we were right. We hiked for around 4 hours on the wall joining one touristic site to another. The weather was great, a bit cold and windy but very clear. It was beautifull, mostly empty outside of our group and a few Mongol girls that hiked all day with us to sell us postcards. We're dead tired, I am not accustomed anymore to hiking for kilometers on stairs in the wind.




We finished the day at the food market in Beijing. There you can find skewers of pretty much anything, raning from lamb to scorpions, including snakes, lizards, larvas, strawberries, etc... We stared at those stands in awe and were pretty much conservative (besides my snake skewer I admit).

Arrival in Beijing

Made it to Beijing, after a long line at the immigration I jumped in a cab and met Evgeni at the door of the hostel (quite lucky). I was surprised coming from India how ultra modern and western most of Beijing was looking. My cab driver had a small medallion hanging from his rear view mirror with Mao's face on it, and 20 cm away his steering wheel cover was full of dancing Mickeys. I wonder what the old Mao would think of this association.
Our hostel is situated at about 5 minutes walking from the forbidden city, in a quite old area, right by the 5 stars but at a chinese price. We're pretty happy about the choice (thanks Dana). As soon as I arrived we left for a short walk which ended up lasting close to 3 hours, as we were always spotting something that was driving us further away. We hiked all around the forbidden city and Tienanmen and ended up so late that the restaurant we wanted to have dinner at was closed.

We had dinner at a small wonton place, ordered for like 4 people and payed the price of a falafel, beer included. Evgeni is not yet very accustomed to the local food so ends up eating vegetarian. Good thing I am with him so I order plenty of stuff and he can try and stick with what he can eat :).