Just a short comment to let you know that I won’t give it another try in writing regularly in this blog for the moment. However I’ll try to post some pictures from time to time! so if you are interested in my new photoblog, just have a look under:
http://www.elzarts.ch/mat

I just returned to Switzerland yesterday night. A tiring journey: it set off in a taxi to the airport in Shanghai at around 7am and arrived at my parent’s home by 22pm (+7h), meaning 22h of travelling.
I’m having some mixed feelings at the moment: Happy to meet Sarra, my parents, my brothers and all friends here, but also sad to leave some very good friends in Shanghai! I really had a great time with all of them and I’m already missing them…

Some of the first things I noticed here in Switzerland:
It’s empty! There are almost no people wherever and whenever you go somewhere.
And it’s so quiet! I just love that at night, there’s really no sound at all. No distant car horn, no ventilation or heating system humming in the background, just pure quiet. Sounds good, isn’t it?
And it feels so good, to open any water tab, and having pure mineral water flowing out if it! What a pleasure! The water here is a million times better than any purified, specially treated liquid you could possibly find in Shanghai! And it just comes out of the tab. *Shuang!!!* (this is one of my favourite words in Chinese: it literally translates into: you feel good through your whole body: from the tip of the toes to the head. One can further exaggerate it by making heavy use of the third tone: taking the voice all down and high up again to express!).

The next few days I’ll probably just try to get rid off my jetlag, meeting some friends and trying to manage my way through some of the later images I took in China. My laptop is heavily stuffed with pictures at the moment: I took totally somewhere around 10’000 images in China! I’m glad to relocate some of them to external hard drives to start organizing things again

I hopefully post some travelling reports over here soon!

Yesterday night at around 3am, I woke up brutally by a flashing, blinking light. I first couldn’t figure out what it was, but then I understood: for some reason the neon light-tube just above my window was flickering.
Still half asleep I dragged myself towards the window to switch off the light. I thought I surely didn’t push the switch fully before going to sleep.

When I touched the button an electric shock struck me. Still half asleep, but now heavily cursing, I pushed it again…and after the second shock I was sufficiently awake to examine to problem a little bit closer:
The switch was soaking in water because there was heavy rain outside, and my windows don’t close fully. I found it a rather funny idea to put an electric switch just under the windows, but that can’t be changed anymore.
And I also thought of the electrician now being fast asleep in a warm bed. He would never share with me the illuminating feeling of being awakened out of REM-phase by two electrical shocks.

Well. With closed and sleepy eyes I considered my options: I couldn’t go back to sleep with the flickering light and it might even be a little bit dangerous to leave it like this. So I dragged myself over to the fuse box to check which of the five switches would remove the potential danger.
Naturally it was the last switch I tried. But not only did it switch off the light, it also shut down about everything else I had in the apartment including the fridge.
Hmhm. I wonder what the other switches could possibly be used for…but since this wouldn’t solve the real problem, I dropped the thought quickly.
So what was my remaining option, then?

I pulled out my Swiss knife and started disassembling the switch. As soon I disconnected the cable from the switch, I cursed again the electrician in his warm bed and went back to sleep. What a night!

Today Jos and me went to see a representation of Suzhou opera in the opera house just 20m from my apartment.
The first thing we noticed when entering, were the big and comfortable seats with sufficient space for the legs. Additionally every seat had a very spacious tea table on the side where a hot cup of green tea awaited us. A kind of a living room experience, actually.

In China there are many different opera styles: the popular ones include Beijing opera and Sichuan opera. The Suzhou-opera style is totally different from both of them. It’s less dramatic and takes much more use of the spoken word. The singings accompanying music is much more simple. In our show they only used two different, light instruments with strings.
I guess the style was initially performed in a Suzhou garden setting, where the scene consisted partially of the surroundings and where the music, singing and acting tried to reflect the intimate personal setting.

For the show that we saw, the scene consisted of one table with two chairs and a big Chinese flower painting in the back. There were just two actors.
The singing was very interesting. I particularly liked the cleanness of the female actors head-voice performing very high-pitched arias. It was also very impressive to hear the volume that the two singers got out of nasal and non-tonal sounds! I liked it a lot!

The spoken parts were very difficult to understand for our basic Chinese knowledge.
They both gave their characters a very noble and proud attitude with very few and simple elements. It was impressive to see the male actor move his hands, body and face-expressions. Yet with this simplicity he reflected nicely the inner calm and pride of the character he played. I indeed liked it a lot! A pity I didn’t understand much of what they said…

All in all it was a very interesting experience! But also a little bit monotone: the setting didn’t change at all throughout and the accompanying music only varied slightly for each song.
It was also funny to see that after about 30min, about half of the audience seemed to be fast asleep in their comfortable seats.
Anyway: we both decided that after one hour we saw what there was to see and hear and left for the second half of it.

Remark: All these conclusions are just a personal reflections based on the two different Suzhou operas that I saw so far…

I recently found another version of an announcement for plastic surgeries (Remember the post on 21nd of juin).

It was again a sort of poster inside a taxi, where you can look at the publicity inside the taxi, but instead of the image of the beautiful lady that would mark the “nice” example, they just simply put a mirror inside!
Though I didn’t understand the text, I imagine it being something like: “Just look at you! We see plenty of potential for improvement! Get a plastic surgery and you’ll look much better!”

Now I’m finally able to show you some pictures of Litang! Located on 4014m and surrounded by vast grasslands, this was my favorite location that Sarra and I encountered during our holidays in October.
During our stay there we did a one-day trip on a motorbike, guided by two friendly locals. It’s a very impressive moment to ride a bike in this beautiful landscape that just never seems to end wherever you go!

A very interesting thing here in China, is the number of people who decide to loose weight. It’s almost a constant topic to talk about it. In particular the people that go on a diet. The funny thing about their decision is that the diets are somehow totally different to what we commonly understand by “diet”.
I once had my Chinese teacher at home and I offered her something to eat. When she told me she was on a diet, I offered her an apple, an orange, some prunes and a pear. You know what she picked?
The banana…hence the only fruit that possibly has some fat inside…

Today at lunch I learned about yet another way of being on a diet from a collegue:
Her secret is to only eat meat from now on…Let’s see how that will go

The first time I encountered this word was in India, where it’s somehow THE character property that people expect from girls. Hence whenever you open the newspaper page with the marriage records, you’ll most likely find “homely” being one of the top three keywords listed in the majority of all announcements. In other words, a girl that not only will stay at home, wash, clean and cook for the man in question, but even “likes” to do so. Well!

This weekend I wanted to go to the yellow mountains. I invited my translator to join me. The plan was all laid out, I knew where we wanted to go to, which trail to follow, the weather was perfect – not to mention the season with all the forest beautifully colored!
And I even offered him to pay for the whole trip for the two of us to go there.

And you know what? He refused my offer with the saying: “Since we have the company outing one of the next weekends, I’d rather stay at home”…
Hmhm…in one word: a “homely” person.

Today I called up a web hosting company here in China to know how much it would cost to have some specific options on a webpage. First question from the sales person: „Which is your website?“…I told him, he looked it up…and the next thing he said was just „you’re not a customer of us.“ And hung up!
No answers.
No convincing me: “You could change to us…”
None of the talking “We provide this and that and you get…”
And other blabla…
He just simply hung up.

(Note: The call was actually made by my translator, but that doesn’t change the facts.)

Together with Sarra, I spent some wonderful holidays in the South of China. We started the holidays together with all the 1.5Billion Chinese that got off work because of the so-called national holidays. An amazing concept: a whole country is basically functionless during one week! With exception of all the people in the tourism business of course!
I made a picture on the first Saturday: it took us about half an hour to go through the city center of Chengdu by bus: It was simply flooded with people that went shopping. The masses were so huge that due to lack of space the people had to walk on the roads as well.

In Chengdu we went to see a cultural show about the Sichuan opera tradition. A very fascinating art scene indeed! The singing style and the make-up habits are completely different to our western traditions. I find it very fascinating that humankind invented over the years such big different ways of performing with our voice! I hopefully get to see more of it!

We also went to see the Giant Panda breeding research base where they are carrying out a lot of research in how to preserve the Giant Panda.

From Chengdu we took the bus westwards towards Kangding where we visited the “legendary” Mugecuo Hu. We enjoyed the walk downwards through uncommon vegetation with a lot of moss hanging down from the trees, which gave it a very mystical look. Enjoy the pictures, though they can’t really give credits to the real-life experience we had over there!

From Kangding the bus led us further up the mountains, close to the border to Tibet, Yaks, different people in differently build houses and vast and never ending beautiful landscape. What really awaited us in Litang I’ll show you in my next post of these holidays…Keep visiting!