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If you upload pornographic images, depending on the impact would be locked dark room until the kill file.

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As the traditional Chinese calendar follows the phases of the moon, the Chinese New Year will fall on a different date each year, usually at some point in late January or early February. In 2010, the new year coincidentally coincides with Valentine’s day, on 14th February.

A traditional part of welcoming in the new year, is to make offerings on New Years Eve to the dead. Today you can still watch in parts of Beijing local Beijinger’s make a small fire on the corner of the road and make offerings to their lost ones. Following on from this, Chinese will set off red fire crackers to ‘drive away the evil spirits’, which are combined with more colourful displays of firework displays on nearly every street corner.

Fireworks were banned by the government in Beijing until 2005 (too many accidents) and since then the yearly display seems to grow exponentially, both with official displays in public places, to local restaurants and bars to celebrate a successful year, to almost every local resident competing with one another for the biggest, loudest and most colourful display!

The fireworks will be set off all through the day during New Years Eve and culminating in a huge show of mass celebration at midnight. As you can see from the short video above, which was taken from the 7th floor of an apartment block in the residential neighbourhood of Tuanjiehu (directly south of Chaoyang Park and 1km north of the new CCTV tower) the fireworks are literally set-off from every corner, from rooftops and even out of windows. This was actually at 12:10 AM, so the peak had already ebbed somewhat. And I am sure closer to the centre, in prosperous areas or purely from a higher vantage point the display would be even more impressive.

The noise of the firecrackers will continue all through the day for the next two weeks … ???? .. xin nián kuài lè!

My office colleague has borrowed a Canon EOS 400D Digital Camera for her first trip to Hong Kong and so we wonder down to Victoria harbour so she can take her first souvenir shots of Hong Kong.

I’ve been meaning to upgrade to a Canon Powershot G9 or G10 for some time. Now I’ve seen there is a G11 on the market and still I’m managing with my little Ixus 80.

But Zhaonan wasn’t comfortable with the size of the 400D, or with all the options, so we ended up doing a swap. It was good for me to see how I would get on with a bigger camera. The ghost ship (left) was one of my first shots. Not perfectly focused, but it was at night without a flash or a tripod and I like the ghost-like appearance of the red-sailed junk and the reflections of the Christmas lights in the water.

Bamboo Scaffolding
Originally uploaded by yabbox

The next shot was of the Hong Kong Cultural Centre and the impressive Bamboo scaffolding clinging to its’ side. It’s a photo which takes a second to work out because of sharp diagonal line combined with the lighting shining through the trees on to the building and the dark sky.

Funnily enough, apart from looking like a tourist with this clumpy thing around my neck, it gave me more freedom to take photos I wouldn’t normally have bothered with. Not necessarily to experiment more, but to feel more professional, rather than a happy snapper. I certainly wasn’t expecting that.

Now I know I need to upgrade my camera..

Train K26 – Shenzhenxi to Nanjingxi
Originally uploaded by yabbox

My last entry explained my stressful journey from Hong Kong to Shenzhen Xi Train Station. That is where I boarded this train to Huangshan.

Shenzhen Xi is a little used train station in the industrial part of Shenzhen. The K25/K26 train service is a privately run route from ShenZhen West ??? to Nanjing West ???. I’ll be travelling as far as Huangshan ??.

I didn’t know there were private train lines in China and apart from the branding in the restaurant car, it is little different from any other train journey in China.

My soft sleeper cabin was tidy enough, but the carriage was certainly showing it’s age and not as clean and practical as the modern soft sleeper carriages found on more popular ‘tourist’ routes. Just little things like an electric outlet in the cabin, electric touch open doors, cleaner toilets. But it is quite serviceable and not very busy, so I’m sure the overnight journey will go by without problem.

Train Warnings
Originally uploaded by yabbox

Probably the most interesting thing on the train are the bilingual signs, like, ‘please take good care of your kids’. There’s nothing wrong with a little bit of social guidance popping up in strange places now is there!

It reminds me of other signs I’ve seen on trains, telling you to ‘throw garbage in it’ or to ‘beware of nipping hands on sliding doors’.

I ate in the dining car twice, first for lunch with the rest of the train crew and secondly for dinner, with the rest of train who were mostly army cadets. The food was cheap and spicy. The staff cheerful but sour.

Despite travelling north through China from the relative humidity of Shenzhen to the desperate cold of Anhui, the air conditioner stayed on throughout the night, humming away and keeping the cabin like a fridge.

Huangshan Rice Terraces
Originally uploaded by yabbox

I woke up at around 6am the next morning and peering back the curtains of the cabin had a lovely view. It’s not every day in China you see green mountains and picturesque rice terraces. My camera was lying on the coffee table and I snapped this through the hazy window.

Dried Spice
Originally uploaded by yabbox

The train was meant to arrive in Huangshan at 07:33 but strangely it was a little delayed, pulling in to the small station around 15 minutes late. I had an hour to wait for Chris and after checking my bags into left luggage in the main hall (for ¥5!) I set off in search of a bank and breakfast. The Bank of China was on Hehua Lu, and just next door the morning market, which sold all sorts of fun and strange foodstuffs from pickled vegetables like bamboo, seaweed, to fresh fruit, live birds, dried spices, fish jumping from their bowls and more. The staff were all super friendly and welcomed my photo-taking.

Just outside I found a little shop selling some delicious hand pulled noodles in a spicy meaty broth (for ¥6!). A perfect breakfast and a perfect hour killed waiting for the train from Shanghai to arrive. I went back to the station, saw how much of Huangshan is being redeveloped and arranged a taxi to take us to the foot of the mountain…

K26 train route is as follows:
ShenZhen West ??? – Bantian ?? – Dongguan East ??? – Huizhou ?? – Heyuan ?? – Longchuan (Guangdong) ?? – Ganzhou ?? – Jian (Jiangxi) ?? – Xiangtang ?? – Yingtan ?? – Lepingshi ??? – Jingdezhen ??? – Huangshan (Anhui) ?? – Jixixian ??? – Xuancheng ?? – Wuhu ?? – Maanshan ??? – Nanjing ?? – Nanjing West ???.

Some things don’t change the world over. You have a day off, and you go grocery shopping to stock your fridge for the coming days. Everyone thinks that China is a cheap place to live. It certainly used to be, and in many cases it still is. Although my apartment isn’t ideal, I have nothing to complain about especially when it is ¥2,100 (£188) a month, exc bills. It’s big enough with an entrance hall and kitchen, bathroom and living rooms leading off this, then a balcony and bedroom leading off the living room, and includes most furniture and electronics. There are some anomalies, the lift stops working at midnight – I live on the 7th of 11 floors, and the fridge is in the living room, but that’s standard here. Also, the hot water pressure is questionable to say the least, but then it is so often in England as well. I am not sure about quarterly bills yet but you can get 2mb broadband for ¥150 (£13) a month, which I suppose isn’t so different from the UK prices.

But food is the big thing, isn’t it? Well that can be very expensive if you don’t have the taste for Chinese food, or the language to order in a small local cafe/restaurant. You can eat very well in Beijing with a huge selection of cuisine, not only from around China, but the rest of Asia and the world. Xingjiang lamb kebabs, Shaanxi noodles, Sichuan spices, Yunnan mushrooms, Beijing duck, Korean barbecues, Moroccan couscous, Vietnamese fusion, Thai curry, Japanese Yakitori, teppanyaki, sushi, Italian pizza, pasta, Belgian seafood, waffles, French pate, steaks, and more and roughly in that order of growing expense too.

My small kitchen has two gas hobs above a huge (rather old and dodgy looking) gas oven and you can buy imported Western goods in a number of shops (Jenny Lu’s, April Gourmet) and markets (ShunYuanLi Market) where you can find most things from Kellogg’s cornflakes, Japanese sushi ingredients, Thai lemon grass, Heinz baked beans, to Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce, Belgian beer, American pancake mix – yeah you get the idea. Of course these imported goods are all at inflated prices as you would expect, to account for the import duty, the relatively small supply and demand, the luxury nature of the goods and just getting it here in the first place. ¥240 (£22) a kilo for President French Brie, ¥9 (£0.80) for Heinz Baked Beans (made in Guangzhou). 10 packets of the US brand Springfield Instant Oats akin to oatsosimple for ¥45 (£4) but some amazing bargains such as a 35cl bottle of Leffe for ¥17 (£1.50). Of course the raw ingredients are cheaper than the pre-packaged items and you can buy a loin of pork, fresh vegetables, or sushi grade raw Japanese tuna all very economically.

I went to my local Jinkgelong for a basket of every day provisions and after living in various parts of the City over the years have come to realise how the stock, service, cleanliness in each of these outlets varies greatly. However you can always buy every day products with ease, but some stores have a wider selection of goods, for example in the Western enclaves their will be more fresh milk on the shelves and Pringle’s as well as Lay’s crisps. I’m in Tuanjeihu at the moment and the stores are quite small so there is not a huge selection available and annoyingly, foodstuffs are one side of the road, bathroom and dry goods are in a store opposite – so you need to queue up twice.

So I come to the point of this post – the cost of a shopping basket in Jinkgelong China compared to that in Sainsbury’s England. I bought 13 items, including eggs, bread, butter, crisps, ham, lettuce. The total price was ¥98.40 (£8.80) compared to a comparative shop online for £12.91. S0 there’s not much in it, especially when you consider some products aren’t the same. For example butter comes in smaller packs, bread comes in smaller loaves and at the same time quality does not always compare, the ham is very different, the salad not always as fresh and organic products are almost non-existent. You also need to take into account how the Chinese RMB is so strong against the British Pound these days. Here are the receipts from each store.

JINGKELONG
Pear Juice 1L – ¥11.50
Crisps Beef 45g – ¥2.90
Butter 140g – ¥11.90
Instant Noodles 120g – ¥3.45
Sprite 600ml – ¥2.40
Shopping bag 60*38cm – ¥0.30
Shineway Shanghui Supreme Ham 150g – ¥13.56
Bread 300g – ¥4.90
Eggs 732gXL12 – ¥18.50
Fresh Milk 500ml – ¥4.50
Lettuce loose – ¥5.29
Real Mayonniase 215ml – ¥8.00
Dairylea Cheese Spread – ¥11.20
TOTAL – ¥98.40


SAINSBURY’S
Apple Juice pressed 1L – £1.49
Walkers Crisps 34.5g – £0.40
Salted Butter 250g – £0.69
Instant Noodles 85g – £0.28
Sprite 500ml – £0.97
Cooked Ham 300g – £2.40
Kingsmill Bread 800g – £1.22
Freerange Eggs Mx12 – £2.64
Milk 568ml – £0.45
Lettuce – £0.49
Mayonnaise 200g – £0.99
Dairylea tub 200g – £1.11
TOTAL PRICE £12.91

I also went to Jenny Lou’s Grocery Store at Chaoyang Park, which seems to get bigger everytime you go in, with a sandwich counter, huge wine section, fresh deli and a DVD store hidden in the various alcoves. In this store you have to be careful with prices as they vary massively depending on where the item was sourced I presume, but a small shopping trolley can soon add up. The six items I bought cost ¥162.30 (£14.50) compared to a similar basked at Sainsbury’s online costing £7.83. This is roughly double and what makes it worse is that some packet sizes vary, for example I bought twice as many teabags in Sainsbury’s, more Jam and more Bran. Again, here are the receipts from each store.

JENNY LOU’S
Twinings Tea Peppermint 25 bags - ¥27.60
Heinz Baked Beans – ¥8.60
Springfield Oatmeal 10x39g assorted - ¥45
Sunny Select Raisin Bran 500g - ¥37.60
St Dalfour 4 Fruit Jam 170g – ¥16
Clovis Wholegrain Mustard 200g – ¥18.60
Shopping bag – ¥0.30
TOTAL PRICE – ¥162.30

SAINSBURY’S
Twinings Pure Peppermint 40 teabags – £1.79
Oat So Simple Original 12x27g – £1.98
Sultana Bran 750g – £1.61
St Dalfour Fruit Spread 284g – £1.38
Wholegrain mustard 210g – £0.59
Heinz Baked Beans 200g – £0.48
TOTAL PRICE – £7.83

Of course this doesn’t account for the average salary in each Country and the shop girls in Jenny Lou’s must have a double take every time an expat pays for his small bag of shopping with 100′s of RMB notes.

And other things are so much cheaper – a bus ride costs ¥0.40 (with an Oyster card), taxi flag fall is ¥10 for the first three kilos, a bottle of local beer is ¥15 and you can go to the cinema for ¥30.

We managed a short visit before closing and managed to see most of the main temples and courtyards, bustling among the tour groups, few devotees and monks going about their daily chores. It was certainly much busier than the solitude at Mutianyu!

Here is a small gallery showing the photos I took with my Minolta camera. There are three galleries, all with the same photos as I am testing the various photo display galleries and slideshows available on WordPress linked to Flickr.

The first is called SimpleFlickr and uses SimpleViewer adjusted for WordPress by Josh Gerdes. It shows up fine in Mozilla and although this has worked in IE’s browser previously, it needs some adjusting to the code which I can’t find anymore and there is no longer any support.

The second slideshow is called flickrSLIDR and is easy to set up, but has very few extra options, hence the photo missing a border at the top and the black background. It is a solid product though.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Lastly, there is the Pictobrowser Photo Gallery, another Flash gallery but working better than SimpleFlickr. It also needs no plugin to work with WordPress. Quite nice looking and customisable. Those two points are pros and cons. If you have the settings in WordPress, you only need to set them once to propagate across your whole site, however you can’t change individual settings for one gallery. However, using this version, you have to change the settings for each Gallery (or paste and copy from code and change the set), so you may end up with a less fluid website, but can change the settings depending on the photo size and particular use each time..

So, which do you prefer? And I mean the various galleries, not the photos. Well them too!
Lot’s more photos to come on the next posts, or you can always look at my Flickr account – where you can leave individual comments too.

Mùtiányù (???) is around 70kms outside Beijing and as such is one of the closer parts of the Great Wall to the Northern Capital. It is for that reason that I wouldn’t normally advise travelling there, as, like my Aunt and Uncle, everyone else seems to be on a tight schedule and wants to fit in as much as possible. If you make the effort to travel just that little bit further away, you can be rewarded with fewer crowds and parts of the Wall which are in better (read worse) shape, relatively untouched and certainly with less hawkers, postcard vendors, cable cars, adverts for ‘One World, One Dream’, and the rest of the paraphernalia which goes with Chinese tour groups.

Having said that, I was hoping a wintry day in February wouldn’t attract quite so many people on a sightseeing mission to the Great Wall and I was right. It took around one hour to drive from their downtown hotel (Lusongyuan Hotel in Jiadaokou) to Mutianyu. We stopped in the souvenir stalls, were welcomed by the staff who were still waking up, drank some Chinese tea with them and then took the cable car up to the top. It was a bright, sunshiny day, but it was cooold and I was immediately glad I had bought my sheepskin coat, woollen gloves and hat. A lovely view. Although most of the surrounding hills were brown and dry, the wall and it’s shadow still had layers of snow brushed up against it’s side and along it’s turrets, while the bright sun reflected off the well worn steps.

We had the Wall practically to ourselves, save for a few brave and determined souvenir sellers and we wandered along far further than we may have done had we been following other tourists. We came back to the toboggan and ummed and arred, my Aunt trying to persuade us both to slide down – I think we all would have done it with a little more persuading. However, it was another, older cable car ride back down to the carpark.

Here is a Photo Gallery of the photos I took with my Minolta SLR.

-- SimpleFlickr Content --
(Please visit the original post page to view the details.)

Such a busy day. Did a lot and finally organised my itinerary for the next few days, or so I thought. Up at 9:30AM and goodbyes to Sophie and Vaughan with email exchange. Returned bike to Paul then took the 11:20AM bus to Leshan.

I didn’t have the ‘death executioners’ seat today on the bus. It’s like the day of your execution when you’re treated well by getting loads of leg room and a view, but a view of your future rapidly coming to an end by the mad dangerous Chinese driving and your future lies in your executioner’s hands sat at the wheel next to you as he teases the last moments out of your life before the crash. the end.

I was hungry and in a hurry and irritable by the time the bus arrived in Leshan and I wanted to make a quick stop to see the Big Buddha. I paid too way much to get a ferry across the river, but it was massive and pretty impressive to see it from the waters edge. I should’ve taken it easy and strolled around the whole area taking it all in properly. As it was I made a quick stop to take in the size, you could sit and have a picnic on one of the Buddha’s toe nails, then walked around the back of the island and saw this old guy intricately weaving bamboo, or rattan into baskets.

I then left the side from around the back exit and returned to the long distance bus station. I was glad to arrive at the Buddha by ferry though, it really showed the size of the Buddha towering above you. Picked up my bag from the lockers and on to Emeishan. Got off at Teddy Bear café to try and find out the lowdown, where to stay and how to climb the mountain. I ended up being badgered to stay at their friend’s hotel around the corner but it was ok. The chat and info over dinner should come in useful, although a few other travellers tales and people to climb with would be useful too. I hope the Stairway to Heaven is worth all the rushing around and the degradation of my Lonely Planet – I’ve ripped out the Emeishan section to ascend as light as possible.. oh my god, tragic!

So, up so early it was still dark and had some breakfast. Then got on my posh red mountain bike which had previously been hanging on the wall of the Oasis and cycled through the rush hour fumes and dust to the Panda Sanctuary. I got ‘15 minutes’ lost but no big problems, I basically didn’t turn off the main road soon enough. I stopped at a petrol station and asked the attendant the way but they akin to some marshans staring at another guy cleaning a van. They didn’t say a word back to me, just stared as if I was the alien, all a very weird experience!

I some how was allowed into the sanctuary for free, although I had to pay ¥1 to lock my bike against the fence. The Panda’s looked kind of cute and cuddly but they were too lethargic to be very interesting or attention grabbing. The park was huge with bamboo growing everywhere (I wonder why!) but there seemed to be no general order about things and I kept walking around in circles and meeting the same groups. There was a Danish family there and the children seemed so excited and an Israeli girl called Lolita Naneenah (or whatever her name was) who was so nice with beautiful long hair but she talked soo much!

I saw seven pandas overall including a ‘Lesser Brown’ fox like Panda and some babies in an incubator which wasn’t so natural and made my stomach turn. I wander if any of them live in the wild any more or if they’ve all been poached.

I thought the cycle ride back would be easier but got a little lost again on the huge and dusty streets coming back into Chengdu but then recognised the bridge over the river. I bought a bike bell for the bike and as a present for Paul, which came in very useful when the roads got busier with stupid cyclists stopping in the middle of the lane for no apparent reason. It’s really strange how they just suddenly hop off their bike and stand there. I got lost even more looking for an email cafe but eventually found one for ¥3 an hour and stayed nearly two hours. I felt very sweaty and dirty cos of the bike ride and needed to change my clothes. Back at the hotel I met Eric, who is Sophie’s friend, who had separated to travel by himself up near Tibet, where Sophie thought it was too cold to go, or something. The three of us had dinner together in a local Chinese place near Oasis, then guess what stopped by Paul’s for a few beers and a some socialising. I changed rooms so Eric and Sophie could share the room together (how thoughtful) but then got so confused in the middle of the night because I thought Jenny was USA Paul who would’ve overslept and missed his flight to Lhasa. Weird.

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