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and a little collage of the signs of Christmas in Shanghai:
The last few photos were taken at a 'European Christmas Fantasy' with trees from Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Italy etc. I just had to take a few pics of the Dutch tree of course lol.
Happy holidays for those who celebrate :)
As some of you already know one of my friends in the Netherlands died last Friday. He will be missed by so many people around him. He was such a warm and caring person. I loved the conversations we had and I learned so much from him!
It wasn’t easy to be at such distance at a time like this. In the weekend following on the Friday night it felt so unreal and the news had not landed yet. I guess the heart didn’t feel what the mind already knew. I mainly longed for distraction. But from Monday I felt devastated. It felt weird not to be able to go to the funeral. Ingo was in India this week so wasn’t home either. I just stayed home and did nothing. It was such a sad week!
I found a quote which felt so comforting to me:
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal ~ unknown
In the past few days all of my friends here in Shanghai have left the country together with their children to go back to their homelands or elsewhere to spend the holidays there. Many of the husbands will follow later though since Christmas isn’t an official holiday here and there’s still work to do.
So I said goodbye to my friends and decided that I really needed to get the Christmas wishes out since I was so late already (I’m always sending my wishes already in November because of the distance most snailmail has to travel). So the snailmail is on it’s way to you (if I have your address lol). Hope you will receive them in time before the holidays, but I fear it will be before New Years ☹.
As Christmas isn’t an official holiday here it isn’t celebrated big. But the Christian churches do have services and I see more and more restaurants offering Christmas & New Year’s arrangements. The shopping malls are getting decorated at the moment. I will take some pics in the coming week to show you more.
But what I can share now are some photos of the Christmas markets here. One of the British international schools here is famous for their Christmas market so of course I wanted to go to theirs. It was a bright and sunny day: lovely for the many outdoor activities. There was a lot to see and do indoors as well though. What I liked about this market is that they had organized many activities for the kids and students as well. Made it a great family outing.
And Paulaner (German brand of beer who has three restaurants/bars in Shanghai) had its own Christkindlmarkt. I felt like walking at a Christmas market in Europe. It all felt so familiar with the Gluhwein and the fried mushrooms and curry sausage. Even the special Christmas-market-mugs were available lol. I loved it!
We spent the day in Tongli yesterday, a canal village at 80 km west of Shanghai (2 hours by car). It takes a lot of time to get out of the city, after that it was quite a smooth drive.
It was lovely to see a bit of rural landscape again on our way to Tongli. I never left the city since we landed here end of August so it felt great to see something else!
Tongli is a lovely place, it’s rather peaceful to walk through and it was wonderful to go off the beaten track and wander through the streets and alleys where people just lived their daily life!
We did have our first photo moment: a Chinese family asking us to be photographed together with us. When people living in a more rural area they are not that much used to foreigners and so we turned into a tourist attraction ourselves ;-).
I knew from earlier visits to China that people can react that way. Once a group of schoolgirls had been giggling over me, just because I looked so strange in their eyes. And even now, when I walk all by myself through a more Chinese area in Shanghai people can stare at me to see how I look like!
Of course we have been trying some new things again. This time we found a man making some kind of candy (picture 3). It looks a bit like angel hair and tastes like a combination of candy floss and nougat. So good ☺.
In photo 4 a man is making a comb, tooth by tooth… with a saw. What a tedious drugdery!
And the laundry, they just did wash it in the canals. Again I wondered whether it would be that much cleaner than it was before ;-).
The weather was rather nice, cloudy but like 13*C which felt nice. We even had our lunch outdoors along one of the canals. It felt good to be able to use a little of my Chinese knowledge (and that they did understand me lol). And with not that many non-Chinese around even a simple hello / ni hao already can create a surprised smile ☺.
We always like to look for a different (not overly tourist) shop. We did have a wonderful meeting with an artist. He called himself the Chinese Mondriaan and we really liked his artwork. He turned out to be rather fond of Holland anyway (don’t know why actually) and we we managed to talk with each other in a mixture of English (he knew a few words), Chinese (I knew a few words) and Dutch (he knew a few words). He was such an interesting man and had great humor. We did have a great time with him and of course we bought some of his work ;-).
All in all we had such a wonderful day out!
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