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…

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!

Note: Some pictures were taken by Sarra.

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!

Note: Some pictures are made by Sarra.

Here are some pictures of a trip that we did End of August. It’s from a small island close to Shanghai. Very pretty and quiet place, at least if you don’t follow the crowds (-:

Finally I take the time to write something about my extraordinary weekend in Hong Kong!
It started a little bit strange: since the Hong Kong custom took too long, I missed my Bus and got delayed by around 1 hour. This was a problem, because I didn’t change any Hong Kong Dollars yet and counted on doing this once I arrived. Since it was too late to do so, I thought that I’d just take the chance and try to buy the subway ticket with Chinese RMB. The man at the ticket corner gave me the ticket for free with a gaze of deepest pity, as if he wanted to say: “Oh dear! That won’t be your biggest problem tonight without any Hong Kong Dollars!”

It turned out to be less complicated than I feared. The dormitory that I stayed in, was a very good place and they just accepted the RMB as depot without fussing around.

Before giving you more to read, I’ll show you some pictures of Hong Kong!

One of the first things I did in Hong Kong was going to Hong Kong Park and viewing some museums over there. I accidentally passed by a puddle with some lotus flowers inside. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw some 50 persons with professional photo equipment who took pictures of it! Hong Kong is really wealthy, I thought…

After doing a bit of sightseeing I stranded somewhere in a small public park and played Chinese chess with a Hong Kong man assisted by around 3 persons who stood around the bench, watched the game carefully and accidentally dropped some comments or hints.

In the evening I paid myself the pleasure to view Hong Kong by night, and ascended for the second time the Victoria Peak.

Hong Kong is full of very friendly people, the city is highly developed and it’s very easy to go around. I enjoyed myself a lot and I’m sure to come back!

The last two days I spent in Ningbo on business trip. It’s a pleasant city at the coast about 3h by train from Shanghai.
Besides the business analysis there was time to do some sightseeing. Here are some pictures of the city.

The first image is an image showing the river in the center of Ningbo. There’s also an image of the fancy dust-, sun- and wind-protector that people use quiet often here in China when riding a bicycle, or electro-cycle.
We happened to walk directly through (more…)

Today I went eating with the staff of a retail-shop in Suzhou (a city close by to Shanghai). In China there’s usually just one person doing the role of the host who will order the food for the whole table. Among other things, the Shop-manager ordered a very special kind of fish: a rattle fish. I was instructed before eating it that it can be very dangerous to eat it: it has a strong poison in it and it’s told that it’s one of the best ways to kill somebody, if you serve him this fish. They further told me that one has to trust the cook that he prepares it in the right manner, such that it is not poisonous. I asked what the trick is and what the cook would have to do, to do it right. They told me that the poison is actually just stored in the liver and the skin of the fish and that the cook just has to throw away those parts.
The fish arrived and I was somehow a bit nervous. Even more, when I was asked to taste it first. I avoided it by saying that I would not know how to eat it correctly with the chopsticks. So the shop-manager laughed at me and took the first piece out of the bowl. I took a similar looking piece out of it and ate it. It had a very strong taste, but it was nicely prepared and I quiet liked it. Since I wasn’t sure which part of the fish we just ate, I asked the shop manager. He just said: “Well, the liver…”.
I thought that there must have been a mistake in the translation somewhere, but I decided to rather go for the vegetables for the rest of the meal… (-:
Besides the fish and vegetables there was another thing I never ate yet: jellyfish! It was very slimy, but I quiet liked it!

Towards the end of the meal, my translator asked me if I would want to take the food with us, and that we can ask the staff of the restaurant to pack it for us.
What he meant was, if I would be ok, if he proposes to the party that I would take the whole bill and that the staff of the shop could take the rest of the meal with them. But this I understood only when the bill arrived and everybody started looking at me.
Not wanting to be rude I took out my VISA and paid the modest sum of 600RMB for a meal where half of the price went into a deadly poisonous fish. Welcome to China!
I just thought that I’ll maybe give a small brainwash to my #*ç&#%!!# translator.

Here are some pictures of Suzhou. We went to see the North Temple Pagoda (first 4 images) and the Humble Administrator’s Garden. (The Chinese guy is my translator: his English name is Simon)

The last day in Bejing we were visiting the Drum tower and some old towns (Hutong) inside Beijing. Here are some more impressions of Beijing.

On the second image you can see very clearly how bad the air in Beijing can get. On the image there was a very strong wind from north that blew away the smog to the south of the city: you can clearly see the border. I’ve been told that the visibility can get down to some 50m in the worst days.

Though I didn’t write much about my first week, be ensured that I enjoyed Beijing very much! It’s a pleasant city and first of all it was very nice to visit it with a good friend that even speaks Chinese…the following days won’t be as easy as the first week…

Finally on Friday we did a trek along the great wall. The route was along a part of the wall that has not been renovated and concluded with some meters on a section for the tourists.

It’s fascinating that this building has endured so many years - the part we’ve been walking on, is about 2000 years old.

On Wednesday we visited the Summer palace. A huge sightseeing site around a lake.