Back to NZ

On the 18th of Feb, Abby and I flew back to NZ. We got a ride to Pudong airport with Abby's school and, as much as I thought they wouldn't, they got us to the airport with plenty of time. The flight home was uneventful, watched some movies, listened to the babies scream in front of us, got very little sleep, y'know, the usual.

Once we landed in Auckland we were met by my Parents. We met up with some family friends, and then caught up briefly with Abby's sister Dana before heading down country in the Old's Jeep. We stopped in Hamilton to meet my Uncle Wade and his family and then continued down to the beach house at the bottom of Lake Taupo.

On the way down country I was amazed at how green NZ is, and even on a showery day the air clarity far exceeded Wuxi. Even more surprisingly, it started raining and instead of everything getting dirty, the rain seemed to have quite a cleansing effect. With my rapidly fading overseas perspective, I think that overseas visitors to NZ must see the place very much as one big park. It seems to be mostly suburban parks and gardens, farmland, or forest and it's all so green and empty. Even Auckland barely manages to pull together a proper urban area. But that suits me, I've had enough of overcrowded cities for the meantime.

We stayed the Monday night in the beach house and the next day we took the boat out for a spot of waterskiing. My brother Steve came up so Mum, Dad, Abby, Steve and I all went out. Steve started out by showing me this new contraption he's got called an airchair. It's a bit like a big waterski with a hydrofoil attached to it. Looks like damn good fun to ride, once the rider has some speed up, the airchair climbs up out of the water on the hydrofoil and rides a good meter above the surface.

After Steve got sick of the airchair, he gave a single ski a bit of a whallop and then it was my turn. So, I squeezed into my old wetsuit and decided to give this airchair thing a burn. I got up on it first time, and thought that there can't be much to it after all (Steve was saying it's pretty hard to get used to) but once I fell off it took me ages to get back up. I finally did though, but then found out that once the damn thing gets up on the hydrofoil, it's a whole 'nother set of rules and I promptly fell off again. Still, it was nice to get out on the water, in the kiwi sun.

Tuesday night we went back down to the farm. We spent the next few days on the farm, Abby got to meet some more of my relations and I got to get the landrover ready for the trip down south. On Friday, the plan was to head down to Christchurch in the landy and it needed a bit of work before it would be ready to go. I put the hard top back on, checked the oils and took Abby for a drive round the farm to make sure it worked. On that trip, the battery let us down and we ended up having to walk back to the farmhouse.

On Friday, Abby and I started heading down to Christchurch. We had a 7pm ferry to the South Island so we made an early start and got away about 10am. After visiting some relatives in Levin and getting lost trying to find some other relatives in Ohau, we made it down to Wellington and our ferry with about an hour to spare.

The ferry crossing was uneventful and Saturday saw us arrive in Christchurch, after stopping for a short while in Rangiora to visit my Great Aunty Lee. Then, Abby and I stayed Saturday and Sunday with friends in Chch, before Abby flew down to Gore to start finishing the organising for our wedding and I'm still in Chch trying to find a flat for us to live in. Hopefully that goes alright, I'm down to Gore on Monday and it'd be nice to come back with somewhere to live.

Last week in China

Our last week in China was incredibly busy, we had the movers come to take away our stuff, we had various loose ends to tie up regarding work, money, wedding stuff, and we also had about 4 dinners to go to. So, here's some photos from our last week, the captions explain things.

The church in the centre of town.

Our last meal at TGI Fridays, Wuxi. We used to come here quite a bit with Courtney and Marcus

Out to dinner with Wilson, a guy Abby tutored all year.

Our last trip to the supermarket. 6 different kinds of chicken foot!

Ducks heads, stomachs, other bits and pieces...

Turtles. In the supermarket.

Guys asleep, reading in the for sale massage chairs.

The masses at the supermarket tills.

Around at Eric and Lynn's for dinner. Matt, Eric, David and Brad.

Abby's last week teaching. Shots of her classes...

and fellow teachers...

Last trip into work. This is the last machine I helped design/build. It's for dishwashers. It forms and bends sheetmetal parts.

The two presses in this photo are 350t and 250t respectively.

Xiaozhu and Gordan, my China boss, and myself, out for drinks after the work dinner.

Last trip out to an electric bicycle company.

Another dinner around at Eric and Lynns. Eric is playing tea-master and he even got his silk shirt out for the occasion.

Brad and GinGin

School dinner at Amazons buffet restaurant.

"Family" photo. Jordan, Shenma, David, Zahid, John, Eric, Lynn, Brad, Matt and Abby.

Big Buddha and Turtlehead Park

As our time in China drew to a close, we were fervently trying to visit all the tourist sites in Wuxi that have been there all year, but we haven't managed to get to yet. Top of our list was the LingShanDaFu, or the Big Buddha. This is a massive statue of the Buddha around the shores of lake Tai, taller than the statue of liberty, apparently. So, two weekends before we left China, Abby, Jordan and I got a taxi out to the Big Buddha.

The first view of the statue you get is on the approach to the park, as you see his head peaking above the surrounding hills. It is from then on that you realise how tall the biggest Buddha statue in China is, and it's quite irresistible to walk up all the steps to stand right underneath the statue.


Big Buddha from afar

Jordan

First, however, you have to pass the Buddha's birth statue, a smaller statue where the young Buddha emerges from a lotus flower and is bathed in the water from nine dragons. It's quite a piece of work, this statue. The lotus flower petals are mechanically powered, and they open to reveal the head of the young Buddha who then emerges from the flower, does one pirouette on the top of the statue stand and is is sprayed by dragon-shaped fountains. It's all rather china spectacular.


Little Buddha getting a bath

After the young Buddha retreats back into his lotus flower, you then pass by a couple of smaller statues, one of the fat Buddha, and another of the big Buddha's hand. Then, there are 99 steps up to the bottom of the big Buddha, and a small museum under the statue. We enjoyed the vistas from the foot of the statue before seeing what else was around the place.




Matt and Abby

The Buddha's Palm

Fat Buddha

The 99 Steps

View from the top.

The Big Buddha Scenic area has almost finished some fairly impressive expansions, including the building of three Buddhist Palaces. We had a look around the one that was finished while we were there. It is so new that we had to wear little cloth booties over our shoes to prevent from marking the floor.



Inside was very impressive. The two things at the top of the impressive list were a big hall decked out with wooden carvings and large painted panels and another big hall with a concrete tree in the middle of it and an amazing neon light display in the ceiling.

These lights formed a big dome above the room. Numerous colours, spirals and other designs were shown in the lights.

The Palace.

Once we got a taxi back towards town, we decided to visit Turtlehead Park as well. Turtlehead Park is a large park on the shores of Lake Tai, closer to Wuxi than the big Buddha. It is quite a large park and the two hours we had left in the day wasn't really enough time to get a proper look around. We did have time to get the ferry across to Fairy Island, an Island off TurtleHead Park. There is a Taoist temple there, a fair few tourist souvenir shops, some statues and a fake waterfall or two.

Taoist Temple.

Fairy Island

Fairy Island

The Ferry that took us to Fairy Island.

XiShan Park

The last week has been fairly busy for Abby and I, I was away earlier in the week looking at electric vehicles and Abby was getting through her second to last week of the school term, which means exams and reports to write. On Thursday night we were out to dinner at a buffet restaurant called Amazon with Abby's collegues and on Saturday we had the movers come to pack and remove all the stuff we are shipping back to NZ.

Somehow or other we have managed to accumulate quite a bit of stuff over the year. When we arrived we had our two suitcases and two boxes we got shipped over seperately. Well, we'll still have the suitcases, but somehow the two boxes had turned into twenty-three boxes by the time the movers had left! All that went surprisingly easily, two Chinese guys turned up and within two hours all our stuff was boxed up and out the door.

After the movers had left, we took a trip out to XiShan park. This is a park overlooking the city, and we've been planning to go out there for some time. It was a good day to head out there, as it was a cold winter's day and the sky was comparatively clear, meaning there would be decent views.

XiShan Park

So, we got our tickets, with the gondola ride included, and headed into the park, straight for the gondola. We chose to take one of the gondolas without windows, thinking they would offer better views, but it was a little on the cold side on the way up.

T'was a cold ride up on the gondola ...

...but the windowless car did give better views.

The view from the top is quite something. It's impressive to see the whole of Wuxi as we only see a small bit at a time from down below. It certainly is a large city, and the metropolis pretty much spreads out as far as you can see. In saying that, I should point out that the smog limits visibility to about 50 km or so.

What is a park without a rainbow coloured gondola to spice it up?

Wuxi city centre.

Interesting to observe the layer of smog hanging over the city in this photo. 

After we'd observed the views for long enough, we headed back down the gondola to have a look at the rest of the park. We walked up the smaller hill in the park to look at the Pagoda that's up there, but we couldn't get in as the middle of winter isn't exactly peak tourist season for that sort of thing.

So, we walked back down the hill and found a cave with a Dragon's Head entrance. With nothing better to do, we walked through the dragon's head to see what was inside the cave. Turns out there was 100-200 meters of corridor that ended in a big room that housed a reptile park. Well, it looked like a reptile park from the pictures outside the room and curiosity got the better of us so we paid the five quai each to have a look inside.

We had to see what was inside the Dragon's Head.

Turns out we needn't of bothered. The reptile park consisted of two pythons that were curled up under duvets (doonas, for our Australian readers), four or five smaller snakes, 4 sad looking tortises and some very poor attempts at terracotta warrior statues. All in all, a bit sad really, but a good example of the sort of tourist attraction we should have expected in a room at the end of a tunnel, behind a Dragon's Head, under a hill in a park in Wuxi, China.

Snakes. Poor bugger was hiding under the duvet until we came along, then the attendant came along and got him out of bed so we could stare at him for a bit.

Very poor replicas of the Terracotta warriors. Can only hope they were supposed to be amusing rather than realistic.

After we left the park, we made our way back to the apartment, but not before calling past our local DVD shop to pick up some more amazingly well priced genuine DVD new releases. I think we may miss those back in NZ, seems the DVD shops back home have a different pricing model, or something.

Downtown Wuxi, opposite the Xinhua bookstore. The parking lot/construction site was houses a couple of months ago.

Christmas in Wuxi

We've just experienced Christmas in Wuxi. It's been just a little bit different to the other Christmas's that Abby and I have been overseas for. Christmas in Europe was very traditional, with Mulled wine and snow and ice skating and everything, and Ireland had nice warm pubs and Guinness, of course.

Well, Christmas in China could best be explained by imagining a holiday back home that is mostly commercial, Father's day would be a good example, and then replacing the Father's day advertising with Merry Christmas slogans. Like, it's celebrated here, there are Christmas trees and Santa Claus in the windows, but it is no-where near the event it is back home. Alot of people miss the meaning or significance of the holiday too, I've talked to a few that have thought Christmas is simply part of our New Year celebrations (Chinese New Year being the big event over here). We even passed one restaurant on Christmas night where the staff were wearing devil's horns.

Before I get to what we actually did for Christmas, I should go back a little bit. Over the last couple of months we have been spending our spare time looking into electric vehicles, with an eye to importing them back to NZ. A couple of weeks ago we visited a place that had some very interesting products, namely hybrid scooters. That is, they were petrol and electric scooters. We thought they were very nice, and Abby was quite chuffed with the one she took for a ride.

Electric/Petrol hybrid scooter. Abby liked the colour too.

Laura and Susan from XXXX Motorcycle Co, and Abby.

One of the good things about these visits is that the company contacts will normally take you out for a meal after you have visited the factory. This time was no different and Susan and Laura took us out to a coffee house/western restaurant for lunch. We're getting the hang of cultural differences here nowdays, but we still managed a small faux pas by ordering coffees after our meal, which the two company reps quietly sat and watched us drink. Apparently, coffee after meals isn't the done thing.

Abby has been busy over the last few weeks helping with the organising of a Christmas show with her school. I've heard all about the various dramas relating to it, and I even got to go along to watch it last week. Abby and Jordan, one of her fellow teachers, had the job of presenting all the acts for the evening and I thought they did a good job. For some reason, Abby got talked into wearing her Dirndl for the show, I guess a German Dirndl looks christmassy.

They had the fountain on outside Abby's school for the Christmas show, a certain sign of the show's importance.

Presenter Abby, dressed in her Dirndl.

The acts themselves varied in quality, as to be expected from a Primary School, I guess. The highlight had to be the real young kids doing a co-ordinated dance together. Was worth videoing, for sure, but I didn't.

The 1st Graders, by far the best act.

Much better than the older kids trying to dance to hip-hop.

Abby and Jordan passing the time while they set up a drum kit for the next act.

The whole school in the last act, a full school song. Note the lady standing up taking a photo in front of me to the right, she's wearing a proper ermine fur jacket, like, you can see the individual animal's contribution to the jacket. Don't see that back home.

On Christmas Eve, Abby and I went round to Brad's house. He's another one of Abby's teacher colleagues, and he had round a half-dozen of the other teachers as well. We ate an eclectic dinner of pizza, lasagne, chicken curry and sushi, with chocolate cake and cheese cake for dessert. We ended the night trying to play the Nintendo Wii, which I haven't touched before due to an addictive compulsion when I get too close to video games. Not bad, but wasn't as good as folks have made out, I thought.

For Christmas day Abby and I didn't actually do much at all. Slept in, watched a movie or two and then went out for dinner. I've been wanting to get some photos of the more scenic areas around us, so I took the camera and we went for a bit of a walk before dinner.

There's a canal just down from our place that has older buildings left on the canal banks. I think the Wuxi government has decided to leave the old buildings on the canal, and enhance the areas around them. This isn't very usual in Wuxi, most of the old buildings have been bulldozed for apartments.

Cold Winter's day, as quaint as the little places on the canal looked, I bet they wouldn't be that nice to live in.

Construction site.

Looking north up past the NanChang Temple Market to the Wuxi city centre. No expense spared on neon.

Nanchang Temple Market, all lit up. Note that this isn't special for christmas or anything, it's always lit up this way.

Nanchang Temple itself.

We'd decided to go to Ned's Kitchen for dinner, as they'd advertised a traditional style Christmas dinner. Unfortunately, apart from the mushroom soup, which was great, the dinner left alot to be desired in taste, quantity and temperature. And they overcharged. So, that was a bit disappointing, but it happens alot in China that your expectations and what actually turns up on your table can be leagues apart.

So, after a dismal Christmas dinner, Abby decided on a do-over on Friday night and she invited Jordan over and we had Mulled wine, Macaroni Cheese and more Mulled wine before watching a few dvds.

Also, Abby and Jordan went to collect QiPao's on Friday. That's the traditional Chinese dress, made in silk. Not sure why Abby got a QiPao made, maybe she's got a thing to collect clothes from all the countries we've lived in. If that's the case, we missed Ireland, but anyway, I'm not complaining as it's a very pretty dress.

Abby in her brand-new QiPao.

Wuzhen canal village and the biannual teachers trip

The week after we went to the Dinosaur Park, I was off on another adventure. The biannual teachers trip. The last trip was a truly Chinatastic experience, so it was with great excitement that I signed up to this one.

School finished at lunch time so that we could go on this trip. One thing that I should mention was that the trip was for the local and international school and that there were four buses of teachers on the trip. Which I am sure was no mean feat to organise. We boarded our allocated buses and sat there and watched the world go by for a few hours. Well actually I sat beside Lynn, one of the American teachers and read kids books. I read one of the "The Magic Tree house" books. They are really good, I fully recommend them.

We arrived at the place and were all told that we could go WC (toilet to those of us in the south) and then told to get back on the buses. In hindsight this was strange as we were at the correct place, but anyway. We got there and walked through a wax museum. I am getting the impression that people are rather fond of wax museums in China. We were punted across a water area and then walked to a restaurant to have dinner.



My first impressions were that it was a pretty little water canal town. All rebuilt of course. Wuzhen was the home town of a very famous poet and writer. We had dinner upstairs in a rebuilt traditional style restaurant.

Once again I got the timing wrong for the meal. I like to warm up a bit before drinking spirits, but unfortunately there is not time for this sort of prudent behaviour at a Chinese banquet. So once again I didn't really drink enough. Well I was a bit put off by how much other colleagues drank and imagining their hangovers. Still dinner was not bad.



Last year dinner was following by an evening of KTV and dancing with the 'Big Daddy' principals, but this year none of those shenanigans eventuated. After dinner we were given our keys and a couple of hundred RMB spending money and told to have fun. By this point the weather was pissing down. Turns out Jordan and I were staying miles away, but we knew that we were close to Lynn and Alice. Well didn't I pick a fine time not to charge my phone! So no battery, and I also had no money on it either. Jordan and I just hung out and had a nice relaxing night.

The next morning we got up and went down to breakfast thinking that we would see someone we knew. Well we didn't. We thought that we must have missed them and that they had already left. Well they hadn't.



All the same Jordan and I had a very nice walk around the town. It was low tourist season so it wasn't too busy. In fact it was like an unsmelly, cleaner, less crowded, Chinese version of Venice, Italy. (I never thought that I could say that anywhere here was cleaner and less crowded than Europe). We ran into Zahid and Ayesha a couple of times which was nice. We also took enough photos for a Japanese tourist to call us over-eager. We saw teachers from our school and the other school on canal boats and thought that that looked like rather a lot of fun.













Jordan, Zahid and I meet up with the other teachers and we all went for a canal boat ride. It was really fun. We saw the Big Daddy principals all dining together. We went all over the place in the boats together. It really was good times.









After our trip around on the gondola we checked out of our accommodation and all meet for a quick lunch. We were then ordered onto the bus where we had to sit for a good while before departing to a chrisanthium tea factory, where we drank a few glasses of the tea, well sampled. Lots of people also bought stuff. They had all sorts of weird and wonderful things, well mostly food goods, to buy there. We tried some of it, much to the amusement of others.





We were then all ordered back on the bus, and we drove to and then across the world's longest bridge over the sea. It is 36 km long. The rail barriers change colour, six times, very beautiful. All of our colleagues seemed immensely proud whilst driving over the bridge. We drove over the bridge, and then we basically turned around and drove back over the bridge. So I was on a bridge for almost an hour. Kinda Strange. (M: This was the Donghai bridge out to the Yangshan Deep Water Port. )

We then headed back to school and scattered our separate ways. It will definitely be a trip that I will always remember.

Blog Malaise

It seems that we've been off the pace with our China blog lately. Well, I guess that's both because we've been busy doing stuff and because we've just been doing normal day-to-day stuff. Because our life is now too boring to bother blogging about, I guess it's time for a change of country. So, next month Abby and I are heading back to little old NZ. We have our tickets booked for the 18th of January, we have the removal company booked to shift the boxes of gear that seems to have ballooned while we've been here and we've just resigned from our jobs. Not much fun resigning as both of us have enjoyed our work over here, albeit at times a bit frustrating but that really is par for the course here.

So, as we wind down here, we'll be trying to frantically see the bits of China we still want to, like Suzhou and Nanjing. Hopefully there will be some posts forthcoming from those trips. Also, Abby and I are gettting into electric vehicles next year, so we've got to fit in a few trips to vehicle manufacturers as well. Of course, there's christmas as well, but that doesn't really seem as much of an event here and even though the supermarkets now have the tellers wearing christmas hats, it's certainly not the event I'm used to.

My brother Ty visited for three weeks just been. As Abby and I were both working, we sent him out into China by himself to have a look around and I have to say he did pretty good. The vast majority of tourists in China only go to Beijing, Xi'an and Shanghai, what I call the China Triangle. Not that that's not an achievement in itself and it lets you tick off the main tourist sites, like the Great Wall and the Terracotta Warriors, but it is pretty easy comparative to travelling in some parts of China. So, I decided I'd give Ty 3 stars if he made it to Beijing, 4 stars for Xi'an as well and 5 stars if he made it to the Three Gorges Dam.  Well, Ty spent too long having a good time in Beijing and didn't make it to the Three Gorges. However, he did call in at the Shaolin Temple on his way back from Xi'an so I reckon he deserves 4.5 china tourist stars. Solid effort, it's not always an easy place to get around in.