Zhongguoist

I haven't updated for ages but there has been a lot of things happening.

About 3 weeks ago now I went to Baoding in Hebei province for the weekend. It was a nice trip but due to the weather being a bit rubbish, I only stayed for a day. Baoding is the place that Baoding Balls come from(they are the little balls with bells inside them that Chinese people play about in their hands) but I didn't actually see many of them. I saw a nice church which was interesting for my Chinese as it had a lot of writing on a blackboard outside, things like 'what is Easter.' I had the local speciality of donkey meat which was quite nice, but very salty. That night I went to a music gig which one of my friends said would be great. It turned out to be very headbangy and made my friend scared as all the people had 'undead' makeup and looked like Kiss.

The weekend after that I went with some of my classmates to Qufu the hometown of Confucius. Qufu is in Shandong and it should have just taken 4 hours to get there but it ended up taking close to 8 hours as the expressway wasn't working. Qufu was ace, they have the Shandong JianBing which are amazing like a type of crisp breads, nothing like the normal JianBing that you get in Tianjin and Beijing. There were a lot of people in Qufu as it was just after the Chinese ancestral holiday of QingMing so a lot of people went to pay respect to Confucius. We went to three main sites: Confucian Temple, Mansion and the Cemetery. I thought that for the price 3 sites was pretty good, we spent almost a whole day around them. My favourite site was the Confucius Cemetery which was like a really nice English woods with flowers that almost looked like bluebells. A lot of the tourists chose to take these buses that take you around but we walked ourselves and it was a really nice day so it was lovely. The Confucian Temple and Mansion had some really old trees that were being propped up so that they didn't fall down.

Last week was my birthday so for the weekend I went up to Beijing. On the Saturday went with some friends to BaZhou Hot Springs. I love my hot springs, in China I've been to loads of them! The BaZhou hot springs was really good, we went at a time that wasn't busy at all and we almost had the place to ourselves. They have a lot of pools, a sandy beach and 3 swimming pools. From Beijing it was really easy to get there, we just took one bus which went straight there. I've been told that from Tianjin you can get either a bus or train to Bazhou and then from there get one to the MingTang Hot Springs. At the hot springs the people were really friendly, sometimes a bit too OTT with their service always rearranging our shoes and refolding our towels. We also had the fish pool thing but as we were the only people in a huge pool it meant that there were loads and loads of fish on each person. The hot springs also boasted a room you could sit on sofas and watch tv as well as free fizzy drinks and fruit in the bar upstairs. Monday was spent in Tianjin in a lot of Korean places and I ended up eating loads. It was an ace day.