Sushi night

Monday was a very important day in the Chinese festival calender, similar in importance as Easter in the western traditions, Chinese mid-autumn festival. Most Chinese holidays focus around the importance of family, and this is no exception- Celebrated by buying Moon cakes, eating, drinking and general merry making, it is a time to be spent with family and friends. Usually everyone in the country has three days off for this holiday, however my university did not! ( we will however get a longer than average National day holiday in a few weeks)- This year i celebrated it a little differently than last year, True i ate moon cakes like last year ( moon cakes are round, baked mince pie like things filled with different fillings, usually sweet) But the difference this year is that instead of spending it thinking about family i spent it with some really cool dudes at the cinema and by eating Sushi. We are blessed in Binzhou ( compared to other small 3rd tier cities) in the fact that we have a cinema (in fact 2!) that show movies in both English and in Chinese, Also in 3D! so on Monday when the rest of China was spending quality time with their families, i was watching Captain America kick Nazi ass!- This was followed by an all you can eat, all you can drink Sake/sushi bonanza at one of Binzhou’s best ( and therefore, expensive) restuarants. We played an interesting card game called Bohnanza ( something about planting beans in a field and trying to reap coins) which ended up being a Sake sculling contest in the end! Hahaha

my partner in crime, Sam, and Jordan.

Kit and Ben

Monday was super fun!

DongGuan, HongKong and GuangZhou

After my little traipse in Australia, i spent one day in Binzhou and headed off to Dongguan to meet my old friend Jules. Jules works for a French company and was in Dongguan for a while so we caught up and went for a little trip!
Firstly we ate Mcdonalds every day- you know in Oz i don’t eat McDonalds, and i can’t eat it in Binzhou as we have none. But for some reason the fact that Jules lives less than 100meters from one made it a temptation unable to be resisted! Our trip to HongKong was one day of summer fueled energy. We visited a small island called Lamma, hiked up a mountain, got sunburned and bought matching hats!
All in all a good trip that only saw me get brought close to tears of frustration once when we couldn’t buy tickets to come back from GuangZhou to Jinan on the train, but in the end it was all resolved as we caught a bus home. 26hrs to get to Dongguan, 26hrs to go back! Long trip, but here are the photos!

Awonderful trip which i hope to do again in February. As for now, i am back to work in good old Binzhou. Happy times.. happy times.

Australia

I had the best time in Oz when i was back for four short weeks. My time was spent visiting family, playing with my gorgeous friends, drinking Whiskey and meeting new people.





fantastic fun times, and i can’t wait to do it all again in a year!

Tags: australia whiskey fun

O.M.G

Well, China really doesn’t want me to leave today, i swear. Firstly i forgot to book myself a hotel in Beijing ( just stupid but i have done it before no worries), endured the hottest bus ride to Beijing known to man, found no hotel under 400 so just went to the airport. slept on a booth seat in front of hungry jacks through a small riot over cancelled flights all because of a massive thunderstorm, nearly went to the wrong gate,- there was no spare showers!!! To top it off i had bad dreams about boys from highschool, and now i am sitting here in the smallest out of the way waiting room known to man…20hrs after i arrived in Beijing and 19 of those hours have been spent in the airport! gaaah! Thank god for free internet! There was one point where i ‘woke up’ to find myself watching Mad Max ( damn Mel Gibson) with a hot chocolate in my hand with no recollection of having bought it or turning the movie on! Sleep deprivation makes Christi go something something… Not to mention poor mum went to the airport today instead of tomorrow to collect me! sigh* Ok China i understand… not to go home anymore!
See most of you very soon Love and Kisses from Beijing Capital Airport ( my third home)

I am sorry i didnt get half the presents i was supposed to get here.. so you will have to put up with my crappy ass gifts i collected over the months!

Bike club!

I joined a biking club this week. I don’t even know the name of it, but a friend introduced me to it.
It sounded awesome; every night go for a ride, as a group, to new places and new civilisations, to boldly go where no rider had gone before…Anyway, i arrived at 8pm at the designated place, had my bike instant-tuned by the professional riders and i was pumped up and ready to go wearing my comfy jeans and a basic shirt…I knew within two minutes that my choice of attire was a bad idea. These guys were super fast! It took all of my effort to keep up with them, sure i had a geared bike as did they all, but within two minutes I was outstripped by everyone save for a twelve year old girl and her protective dad. Did i mention i was going hacks? like riding for my life, the hounds-of-hell-are-on-my-heels kinda fast? 25 minutes in, i am still in front of the little girl, but only by a small margin, the other 46 people in our group were just flashing red tail lights in the misty distance, their red glows taunting me. 30 minutes and we had finally reached our destination. At the top of the hill lay the “yellow river mother” a scenic spot 13ks out of the city limit. It was at this point I thanked whatever gods had blessed me to be the only person in my family not to suffer from Asthma! On the way back I didn’t push myself as hard as on the way up, but i still challenged myself- All in all a round trip of over 26ks on my first night! lets just say copious amounts of Watermelon was consumed after.

A trip to Beijing..for a day.

So, I had planned to go to Beijing for a few days to see our beautiful Spanish friends off in a fashion befitting our little family. However i stupidly left my passport in the drawer back home and ended up coming back to Binzhou early (If you don’t have a passport with you, you can not check into hotels in China) We worked through some plans of maybe staying in an all night massage place, or an internet bar, but decided against it and in the end caught the last bus of the day back to Binzhou, A very sad occurance indeed! However we managed to fit in one temple visit while we were in town, the same one i have gone to every time i go to Beijing,(yonghegong) and every visit seems quicker and quicker! It was a blistering hot day, and the foreigners were out in droves! Photos of our last adventure follow.

Miss you guys, All the best for your future and i hope we can meet again soon. Binzhouxueyuanbeimen forever!

Kirin coffee and some art.

Japanese brand Kirin gave me a pleasant experience when i tried this coffee drink. I wasn’t expecting much, having had some bad experiences with coffee in cans and the like, and although this is nothing on an iced coffee BigM that you get from the milk bar, it was suprisingly good. ( though i don’t know if that might be because my taste buds have changed?) Basically, to sum it up, it is very strong (hardly any milk taste) and very sweet. I am not sure if it had any additives like guarana or ginseng which is popular over here, as i can’t account for why it has “FIRE” written on the bottle, maybe because this stuff is strong?! Anyway, i forget which rating system i was using for these posts but it gets top marks ( five spoons?) and is reasonably priced at 4yuan ( 60cents)

some ‘art’ i have done while here…you can’t see the image very clearly but you can get the general idea. In the back, from left to right- Ester, Dani, Safa, Me, Julien and Huaiqian. in the front: Lucy and Reda.

Hope you are all well, if anyone still reads this haha.
see you soon.
Xx Christi