Zhengzhou - Day 4 (23 Dec 08)

I don’t remember when did I get up the next day, but I surely didn’t sleep well enough.  The bed cracked whenever I turned, crack, crack crack!  The night before we agreed to get up at 7 am, Kyle’s alarm rang at 7 and I sprung up :p  Anyway, our first stop was the Longmen Grottoes.  My notes didn’t help much in pointing us directions, Shane and Kyle’s guidebooks did a great job… I still don’t want to admit it!

 

That’s Kyle on the left and Shane on the right.  People were staring at me when I was with them, did they all think I was a traitor?  And obviously all of them wanted to rip us off!  The Longmen Grottoes was so huge and serene (because of the cold and the lack of tourists at the time?), I was so impressed.  In the picture you can see this BIG Buddha, Kyle and Shane are just too tall.  There were too many damaged Buddhas, big and small…

 

So there were my 2 newly met friends, at first it was hard to understand what they were saying because of their Scottish/Irish accent, luckily I got used to it quickly.  Those two young a*holes (pardon me) sometimes talked about me right in front of my beautiful face in a language I couldn’t understand!  So rude!  And they surely knew how to make good use of their heights to bully me!  It wasn’t fair!  Aw, I was so mad!

 

Hilarious picture :D  Even the Buddha did the super Hong Kong stylish “V” sign :D  We Hongkongers are so cool!  There were some tourists groups following right behind us, it wasn’t really that agitating at the beginning, but once the guides took out their microphones, we really just wanted to kill them all!  (How could they speak in some dialects which I couldn’t understand?)  That’s outrageous!  We waited till all those groups were gone and took some really amazing pictures with my super cool camera!

 

There were so many steps and too many Buddhas…

 

 

The best picture of the day (in my opinion anyway), very nice, no tourists in sight other than us, those Buddhas were amazingly enormous!  How the only empress in Chinese history managed her people to get it done is of course beyond me, at that time my only thought was “this is so crazy”.  If I were the empress, I’d definitely make better use of my human recourses.. like making my soldiers to seize all gold in India… may be?

 

The weather wasn’t really that good that day, and it was freezing cold.   My mood was good and my head was sober.  I had been travelling alone for a couple of days, I was so lonely at the time and was so glad to have some company.  I was so weak, mentally.  Though Kyle and Shane could be annoying sometimes, I really enjoyed our time together :)  They were so childish but that made them unbelievably good travel companions.

 

I saw the sign and asked them “What does ‘Wast’ mean?” without reading the Chinese translation.  WAST HILL!  HAHA, Shane immediately corrected me.  It was so hilarious, there came this great picture.  If you look closely at Shane, you could see him smiling too!

 

This is how Longmen Grottoes looked like from across the river.  You see the enormous Buddha in the middle of the picture?  That was where we took our “Picture of the Day”! :)

 

In this temple we met the famous 18 Bronze Men (十八銅人).  Actually there wasn’t much to see in this temple… except…

 

This MALE DO NOT sign located right outside the female washroom!   HAHA!  I just love China!

 

After Longmen, I wanted to go to Guanlin temple 關林 which was my last destination for Luoyang.  I have already bought a train ticket back to Zhengzhou when I first arrived Luoyang, which left at around 16:20, but it was technically Kyle and Shane’s first day in Luoyang, so I thought they wouldn’t go to Guanlin with me but in the end they decided they would :D  Thank Kyle for the ice creams (it was so beautiful to eat ice cream in the freezing winter!) :D  (oh, I so want to write about this man sitting on the ice cream drop but I’d better not :p)

 

Haha I think this is another really beautiful picture with our Kungfu poses!

 

My handsome, young, and funny friends!

 

The shining, golden Guanyu Statue!  Now you know why I wanted to come here :D  I just love everything gold!  It was very interesting to see a police man worshipping this statue, Hong Kong Police do that too, but why?  What is the connection between Guanyu and the police???  Anyone knows this please fill me in!

 

Nice shot of Kyle :)  My seventeen years old friend!  He lied and told me he was 22!  I only learned the truth after I came back to HK……  he surely looks young :)  Hm, just like me! :p

 

This is the only shot I have of  Shane smiling “normally” to my camera!  He said he looks better without a beard and the reason why he had the beard was to keep his face warm.  Hmmmmmmmm.  No comment :p

 

The last picture of the day.  The only thing worth noting was the player embedded in the…. thing :p  How could I ever learn how to call those Chinese things in English?  It was quite odd to see the player (CD player?) in such a holy (and golden) place like the Guanlin temple!!

 

Kyle and Shane saw me off in the train station and there we bid farewell. I wanted to have their contact numbers, but they didn’t have mobile phones with them… I truly appreciated their companionship in such a lonely time, they were really funny and I had a great time travelling with them.  Even though just for one short day.  We were all going to Shanlin Temple the next day, it really was up to fate to decide if we could meet again there then.

 

Bye for now, Kyle and Shane.

 

del.icio.us Tags: zhengahou,guanlin,guanyu,scene,Longmen,Grottoes,Wast,West Hill,CD player

Zhengzhou - Day 3 (22 Dec 08)

On the third day, I decided it was the right time to go to Luoyang.  The name “Luoyang” is beautiful despite my friend Scott told me how horrible that city was beforehand.   I got up really early that day, went getting my breakfast in the small “market” right outside the campus, you could get everything there, clothes, fruits, snacks, water, Cantonese food, northern Chinese food and of course accessories too.  I even got my good pair of pinky gloves as well as my hat there in a little shop.  Everything was so cheap (because they are all targeted at poor students?)!  I got 2 flour cakes for just 2 Yuan!  Very oily… but yummy!!

 

This was a long story, but I went to this wrong shabby hostel when I was in Luoyang.  On my way to that hostel, I saw those kids playing with ice on the floor (you see how cold it was then?!), the picture wasn’t really good, but I could understand their excitement because the snow was late this year….  I mean, last year.

Anyway, so I went to this scary and dirty hostel, paid but only realised later on that I went to the wrong hostel.  At first I was too stubborn (and snobbish) to change to this other clean, warm hostel, because I paid for the night already, but Cindy and her boyfriend insisted that I should change after I told them about the hostel, haha, it really was a bad hostel, I guarantee!   In the evening I went back to the hostel and made up a story about staying with some friend in Luoyang, but the old hag just couldn’t give me a cent back.  My childish revenge was to steal the cheap lock and didn’t flush the toilet when I left for the new hostel. HAHAHA.  That was how I met my Irish and Scottish friends :)

 

Anyway, after putting down my things (actually just a towel) in the shabby hostel, I went to the famous White Horse Temple (ba ma si) alone.  The ticket selling guy spent the whole 5 minutes staring at me, giving me this mean look which almost made me tell him I wasn’t the real student card holder, in the end he let me go of course.  I was so glad it was winter and I was wearing a hat and everything!  Heh, after all I’m the lucky bastard!

 

There was this Hongkong tourists group (haha, I didn’t breathe any Cantonese when the tour guide was explaining, I was pretending to hang around and didn’t understand a darn thing :p) and I followed them for a while to learn the history about this famous temple :D  It felt so great upon hearing Cantonese!  It was really funny how I couldn’t understand what people were saying to me even when they were speaking Mandarin, most of the Zhengzhou people speak really accented Mandarin.  Anyway, after 15 minutes the group went sparse and I was as aimless as before.

The monk in the picture was very nice and helpful!  He talked to me (haha I was trying to take a nice shot of him clearing up the burnt incent sticks, he probably found that quite annoying!) and pointed me directions :D  It’s all about luck, my friend!

 

It always makes me laugh to see how Chinese are trying so hard to make those touristic spots looking as nice as possible but always fail to do so.  See that big sunbrella?  Why would they put a sunbrella right outside the temple?  What was the use of that?  Let me know if you know :)

 

 

This is the famous White Horse Temple.  Traditional Chinese characters rule!

 

The monk told me to have a look at this Indian style under construction temple.  I saw 2 Greek (I guess?) and 2 Chinese guys, they followed me and went to see this temple.  I grabbed my chance and asked one guy to take my picture.  He asked if I was from Guangdong, I said yes, he said I’ve got the look and he worked in Guangdong for a while so he could tell.  I don’t know if I was looking like a southerner but it’s interesting how people could just look at you and tell where you’re from.

 

There was no one but me… luckily the sky was bright and the place wasn’t scary…  I also walked to see the monks’ living dorms.  It was very simple and one old monk stopped me from getting too close by saying there wasn’t much to see.  I believed him and it was getting late.

Later that night, as I wrote before, I changed a hostel and befriended one Irish guy named Shane and one Scottish called Kyle  (they were super funny blokes) :)   Within half an hour they named me “The Hong Kong Bitch”, because I couldn’t hold it and said Shane’s feet stunk, haha, but they really were!  It worried Cindy sick after I told her I was sharing a room with 2 foreigners, hehehe…

The next day we travelled together to see Luoyang.

 

del.icio.us Tags: hostel,zhengzhou,white horse temple,incent sticks,breakfast,food

Zhengzhou - Day 2 (21 Dec 08)

On the second day, my cousin, Cindy, was travelling with me to Kaifeng. I remember it was a rather depressing day, everywhere was so misty, and so cold. I desperately needed a hat and a pair of gloves, my hands were freezing red and my hair was a mess because of the wind. In China, mark my words, I can’t look pretty.

That’s Cindy inside Long Ting Park. Ah yeah, I definitely have to mention that I used Cindy’s classmate’s student card in order to get the student discount :p I have no money! Those guys just stared at me back and forth, and it made me wonder… did they really think I looked like her classmate?

 

I never expected the weather to be so unbearably cold, I wished my hood could just cover all the way down on my face so that I couldn’t feel the cold anymore. The sun brought no warmth. The whole place looked very superficial to me… so designed for tourists, but there weren’t many tourists, we almost had the whole park for ourselves.

 

The whole park is surrounded by water. It would look really good in Spring or Summer if the weather'd be super!

 

HAHA! She and I were looking really dreadful in all those pictures taken in Yang Fu (楊府). It was just so freaking cold!

 

I don’t know what that is called in English… it was just like a pavilion for us then. Cindy and I decided we should eat something and after walking around in the park for a while we finally spotted a kiosk. We bought 2 cup noodles, haha, it just never came to my mind before that hot water could be provided when you buy cup noodles (it wasn’t like 7-11!), the best thing was, we just left the cups there and gone. HAHA!

 

OK, this picture looked rather nice, we had our noodle and rested, I was warm :D The water was freezing at the back though.

 

All those ancient buildings are super cool! If I ever dressed like a ancient Chinese I’d live there forever and become part of the sight, haha. I don’t want to ever live there :p Cindy was really scared of those carved stones in calligraphy.

 

Saw many couples taking their wedding pictures in the park. The reason they picked this park was beyond me, look at all those empty bony branches, see the misty gray sky, feel the icy cold! Well, I guess sometimes people just do things they can’t even explain themselves… It was really funny to see the bride putting some clothes on immediately after she got the shot done :p

 

Later on we went to Qing Ming Shang He Yuan, it was a replica to the famous painting, everyone was dressing like a Qing in there, it was quite big and interesting… We didn’t really have a lot of time to walk around the whole park. Cindy said it was so crowded in high season, I can imagine.

 

Hahaha I really looked like I couldn’t smile anymore in this picture! So fake so fake so fake :D

 

The view was very good but it also was super windy!

 

It really was too cold outside and we had problems holding my camera still to take pictures, so we went into this large old building and lucky us saw the performance timetable. After paid 10 Yuan for 2 seats, 2 cup of warm tea and waiting for half an hour, we got this 5-min live performance. Good-looking young kids playing some cool Chinese music instruments and some pretty girls dancing some Qing dance. It made me wonder if they’d perform too if there was no one watching.

 

Those were the instruments that they played. So talented!

 

del.icio.us Tags: Zhengzhou,cold,misty,gray,branches,noodles,Qing,dance,wedding,bride

Zhengzhou – Day 1 (20 Dec 08)

It was a warm (almost too hot really) and beautiful Dec day, I had my backpack on my back, camera on my neck and set off to Zhengzhou. My flight was leaving from Shenzhen Int’l Airport, so first I had to take a bus there. I was quite nervous as this was the first time I travelled to China, alone; and going to Shenzhen alone too.

It was surprisingly small, Shenzhen International Airport. I mean, with the word “international” in mind, I thought it would be as grand as Hongkong Int’l Airport… but hm, may be I was asking too much from China, haha! OK, I admit I’m very picky.

It was a 3-hour flight, there was this Hunan (fashionable) girl sitting next to me, she was glancing curiously at me so I broke the ice and asked where she was from, what was she doing in Shenzhen/Zhengzhou etc. She works in Shenzhen and was visiting her aunt in Zhengzhou. She was as shocked to see those short buildings as I was when the plane was landing. It was too remote… and, well, let’s put it this way, rural.

My cousin and her boyfriend picked me up from the airport and we took a bus to the main bus station then we changed to any other bus to their university. I could understand why they worried the guts out of them when I came back to their university after 7, that’s when the busses stop working :p (can you imagine how hard it was for me to leave anywhere around 5? It was terrible!)

That’s 2.7 Tower in the picture, shame we never got up.

This place reminded me so much of Shanghai. The roads were so open, so many shops. You could hardly see anywhere that OPEN in Hongkong. Oh we had super delicious (spicy!) grilled octopus there then, and super cheap!

So this was it for Day 1.

Experimental - Nathan Road

At night, Nathan Road, TST.

Experimental - Peninsula

Another experimental picture taken in TST. I was shooting in Manual mode, well, just trying anyway. Turned out most of those pictures looked rather good :D Well, at least that's what I think!

TST - flower

I am such a romantic lady :) On one misty afternoon I couldn't supress my urge, so I went to TST.

Honestly I thought I knew this place too well to really discover anything new, but well, Hongkong is such a magical place, it did suprise me from time to time.

Picture of the day, which is also my current wallpaper, a beautiful flower struggling in the wind.