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!

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!

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…

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!”

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

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.

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

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!