China Discover Blog » Julian

The heart of our flat

Julian — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 01:56:37 +0000

Many of my overseas friends often ask me how I manage to cope with the different culture in China, the social requirements here and the challenges of everyday life in a totally alien language in general. I then tell them that it is not so difficult as long as there is place to go back to when the batteries are empty.
For me this place is my home library.

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.

Photos of the Li River hike

Julian — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 01:37:34 +0000

Here some more photos of our hike tour along the Li River:

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:

A hiking tour to Liang Jiang

Julian — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 01:57:08 +0000

Last Sunday I went with a group of local Guilinese out to the countryside. Our first destination was the village of Liang Jiang from where we hiked towards the ancient fortification system in Zhu Cun. The village was a colorful mix of buildins from many different dynasties and sadly many houses were not inhabited anymore.

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.