china3

China 2007 - page 3

Fancy fruit stall in the streets of Guilin.

Looooved them!!! They remind me of the ones in the film "The Labyrinth" with David Bowie.

It was not allowed to take a picture of the holly Confucius, but I did. This is the cave where people bring gifts and prey to him..

Rocks of the Solitary Beauty Peak with poems carved out.

Little prayers on blue ribbons..and a view at Guilin surrounded by the wonderfull mountains.

The many steep stairs leading up and down the mountain.

Cute panda-donation-box...used as a trashcan now..
I was thinking of secretly taking this with me in my bag as souvenir..Pitty that it was too big ;-)

A woman making the traditional embroidery of one or the other minority group.

View on the Elephant Hill, with a fake-fisherwoman...with the traditional comerant-birds..
She was just standing there for the tourists.. sad!

Just like these girls in minority outfits. You had to pay if you wanted to photograph them... The Chinese tourists love this kind of ripoffs.

Here you can clearly see why the hill is called "Elephant Hill".
I think it is really pretty even when behind my back where standing loads of very loud Chinese tourists..

Wonderfull poster of a ballet show. I wonder if they really performed in the cave?! I think not.

Everything around the Elephant Hill was in "elephant-theme".

Chinese grafitty!! No joke!! You see it all over!

Me sitting on such a lovely elephant bench.

Orange blossoms! This is probably the most fantastic scent you can imagine!!

Buddhistic cave-temple just behind the Elephant Hill.

Wonderfull paintings we accidently discovered in an old Chinese house.

Chinese men are very fond of keeping little birds and carrying them to the park to enjoy their songs
while they play some kind of chess with other men.

Pretty pagoda with view on the river Li.

Little elephant rock by the river Li.

Another strange cake..

Trying chinese food in a very crowded restaurant..they even had "bamboo rats" and worms on the menu...

Thanks to my little chinese dictionary I managed to order BANANA BEIGNETS!!! jumm!
The only problem was that they were soo extremely sticky that the waiter had to cut them with a scissor!!
I also dont understand why they always present sweet food on salad leaves...

A truly magic place: the tea pavilion on a lake in Guilin city!

It's an artificial island with lots of pretty bridges and portals, like a scene from a Chinese fairytale!

A big complex of traditional wooden houses on our way through the mountains.

One of the many ladies of the Yao people. A minority group where the woman have floor-length hair.

What a pitty that they dont wear their hair open.. I found it rather...hmm...strange, the way they wrap their hair on the top of their forehead.

I was so charmed by this two sisters! They were drinking fruit juice out of weird kind of plastic lemons?

Their village was across a broad river, the only way to reach it was over this bridge.

Groovy Yao lady. Watch her earring!

The men of the village.

Stairs to one of the houses

And little puppy streetdogs, like everywhere in China.

A group of Yao ladies. Actually they were really not cool, they kept on stalking us asking money, screaming all the time this:
"Hallo, Yaooo, Hallo Yaooo, longehaeer, longehaeer!!"

Yummy snacks.. (they eat it like we eat potato chips...)

Here we were visiting the rice terasses of Long Shen. Because it was a long way walking up in the mountains,
you could hire such a chair with 2 carriers. Really sad. Most of the men who were doing this job were even really old people.
We walked.

On the left side in the picture you see 2 women with strange things on their head.
Actually those are towels wrapped around their head.
Up in the mountain village is a hotel for tourists, but because there is only one way to reach the village, the steep stairs,
this old ladies carry large baskets on their back, with the ropes around their forehead.
In those baskets they put the lugguage from the tourists...and they carry them the whole way up.
Again I was shocked to see this happening and I felt guilty being a tourist.

This is the village" Ping'An" up in the mountains.

And another fantastic add.

Old lady from the village, wearing the traditional "towel" on her head.

The steep stairs leading up to the houses.

All the red papers are remains from the fireworks for the Festival Of The Dead.

That's why you should not eat meat in China...This is a very common sight.
Me as a vegetarian got the creeps seeing this, but at least the dog is happy!

Dumped red lampions..

And for some reasons I found this coffee bar not very inviting..

Here you have them again, the pretty girls in costumes. For some small money you got to photograph them.
Actually they found it very strange that I just photographed them, not posing together like all the other tourist want to do.
If I got it right, this girl's wearing the traditional "miaou" outfit. I totally fell in love with the headdress here.