The Excuse
There has been a silence.....a looooooong silence, but we are back again!! It is not that I have not been active or anything, on the contrary, but I just never really sat down to actually post things. There are still things that 'need' to be reported, such as the follow up of our Chile visit (already a year ago, but I cannot keep those beautiful landscapes unused on my harddisc), more cooking stories (where I've taken pictures of nearly every dish that I prepared over the past year), but first we are going to China!!
The Promise
Coming weekend we will travel to China to enjoy 3 weeks of beautiful food, landscapes, people, etc. Really looking forward to that and I have to be thankful to an old promise me and a friend made already like 6 years ago. When we visited China for the first time with a studytrip we were in Beijing that at that time was an official Candidate City. While they were painting the grass in town green (it was summer and we had a heatwave so not much green happening to impress the committee) we promised to return to Beijing if they were elected to organise the 2008 Olympics. Well now you all know the story and there we go, to Beijing again!!
The Trip
We plan to fly to Shanghai and spend a few days in that cosmopolitan city to enjoy its splendor. After that we more or less want to travel to Xi'An making a few stops along the way such as in Suzhou (many many historic gardens (UNESCO)), Huang Shan (Holy mountain and UNESCO landscape), Xi'An (Terracotta Army again UNESCO monument and some nice things in town), Pingyao (Preserved Ming time walled city where the first bank in the world was stood, guess what? it is an UNESCO site), another stop that is still open, and finally ending in Beijing where we will see what has changed over the past few years and visit some of the olympic events such as athletics, diving, synchronised swimming and BMX bikes.
The Issue
I cannot say how much I am looking forward to returning to one of my favourite Asian countries!! Of course people always remember me that it is the same country that supresses Tibet, etc. but I am not going there for the government or anything, I am going there to enjoy the people, the food, the landscape, etc. And in China, just like in the rest of the world unfortunatly, the government and the people are not the same thing. I also visited San Francisco and not because I agreed with the war in Iraq.
Well I will keep you posted and hopefully will be able to post some pics every once in a while from China.
