We're about ten or so days into the Chinese New Year now...

... and I think I've got some sort of new year blues. I haven't been feeling any great motivation to do anything, obviously haven't written here for ages, have been neglecting my friends and reviews at the IMDB, and haven't really been doing much apart from working, sleeping and eating (though, alas, of the latter I've been doing a good bit). Himself is living with me in Beijing now, in our wonderful, big, gorgeous apartment, and it's not like either of us are unhappy with that fact- it's just that we seem to have fallen into this sort of comfortable couch lethargy. I suppose that celebrating the new year twice may have left me in some sort of emotional jetlag? And the twelve-day trip home to Wuppertal in Germany probably didn't exactly help establish any routines either. (Though I did have a wonderful time with the family, doing pretty much nothing but talking, catching up, drinking and eating my mum's divine food- I just haven't been able to make the transition from holiday mode back to normal, it seems.)

I came back the day before the Spring Festival (春节- chun jie, as it's called here) and had another week off as part of the public holiday. During that week the most exciting thing Himself and me did was to go to Tianjin, which is 120 km from Beijing and, like Shenyang, was an Olympic venue. Unfortunately, however, the train journey there and back was the most exciting thing about the whole trip, as we found the city to be quite the soulless kip. It wasn't terribly dirty or anything, just the parks and old architecture that we saw didn't appear to be very well looked after- and they were the only thing to really see there (apart from the Olympic venue, which did look kind of impressive, even for us Birds Nest-spoiled Beijingers.) The train was brilliant though- half an hour on a brand new, lightning-fast, fully staffed bullet train for the equivalent of about 7 Euro each way. A fantastic deal indeed, especially when considering how, on my way to Frankfurt airport to catch the plane back to Beijing, the ticket inspector was going to charge me the full price of a single journey (60 Euro!) because I didn't have the exact same credit card that I used to book the ticket. He didn't in the end, but this incident makes the discrepancy in service (and price!) between the two just seem painfully ironic.

Anyway, I better get back to my mysery and will leave you with the few nice pictures I got in Tianjin.

Until I feel like writing again,

Nadine

This willow sure must be doing a lot of weeping, sitting in that sorry excuse for a park...

To quote Himself, "Nothing says Nature to me like a plastic bag in a tree."

That's nice though.