On Asia Square, native dancers from United Arab Emirates were dressed in traditional Arabian robes…chorus, drum performance of Soweto on Africa Square turned the park into another highlight, audience were danced together with cast memebers…The circle dance expanded larger and larger…

I liked the music, lighting and fountians, I love every minute tonight!

How can a bridge be interesting you may ask, but this special Bridge has quite some background:

People in Guilin always had the need to cross the river to get from one side (city center, palace) to the other (Seven Star park, etc) and vice versa.

Pretty early they started building a pontoon bridge, a construct made of boats, jointed by ropes and bamboo mats laid over them (Photo on the right). This bridge had the disadvantage that it had to be disassembled every time a number of boats wanted to pass the bridge.

In 1939 the people of Guilin build a more modern, steel framed bridge named after the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-sheck. This bridge, while much more stable than the old one survived only until 1944 when it was bombed by the Japanese.

After that, the Guilinese returned to their old pontoon bridge, but kept the same name as before.

In 1951, with the Generalissimo falling out of favour in China, a new concrete bridge was constructed and named “Liberation Bridge” the bridge lasted until 2001 when it was removed to make way for a new bridge that could handle the increasing amount of traffic.

Someone told Julian the cake is not only a food, but also a weapon for fighting.  He smiled: Then we need two cakes! One for eating, one for fighting.  When the cake boy showed up, we asked Julian to answered the door.

He was astonished to find two cakes!

No one tells him the tradition has changed: One cake will not be enough for the whole office, we have to book two…

Wanna know how his face looks like after the party?  It was awesome!  He deserved that.

This is the place where I and my wife spend most of our time in the evening. When I feel unhappy or angry, or I think of taking the next flight back to Germany, I go here and find peace. At the moment we have only 600 books of our combined collection here in Guilin: Half Chinese from my wife and half in European languages from me. We still have a few hundred copies in Europe and in my wifes hometown and hope to reunite them with their brothers and sisters soon.

First, a photo from our hotel on the sourrounding area.  The hotel was sourrounded by mountains, so everyone going to the hotel (which we luckily did by car) or to the river had to pass the mountains first. There seems to be a “village joke”, that everytime an outsider asks “How far is it to the river” the reply will be “Not far, right around the corner”. They also played this joke on us, and after 40 minutes walking we still could see no water.

What we found on the way, though, was an old man taking care of his bees. He told us that he kept the bees there to produce wild-bee honey. We asked him if he would sell us bee-wax to make some candles, but his price was way too expensive (foreigner price).

After finally reaching the river we had some time to refresh ourselves in the cool Li River water and take a raft a bit downstream. We were not the only ones enjoying the cool wet:

In the middle of the village was a small mountain containing a cave (called “Lion Cave”) which was used in ancient times as innermost defence against enemies. A local farmer was kind enough to show (and clear) the way to the cave entrance and lead us through the cave itself. On some parts it was a bit dangerous as the ground was slippery and there were pretty deep holes in the floor, but the group took good care of each other, so we passed through safely.

After this small adventure we took the bus to the water reservoir to have a good swim and escape the blazing heat.  Before beeing able to jump in the water we had to climb the wall of the reservoir which was, by my standard at least, pretty steep (as can be seen on the photo on the right). We spend about 2 hours paddling in the water, eating water melon and enjoying the day before taking the bus back home to Guilin. It was, by all means, a very successful day.