weekend away!

Last week was a fun, busy week with some nights out -notably a Shandong trip reunion in Hou Hai (a photo of hou Hai at night to be posted on blog soon); such a wonderful place; we went to Hutong Pizza (best Pizza in Beijing apparently) and spent an enjoyable night in the heat.

This morning around 8am I got back to my appartment having suffered through a 9 hour train journey standing up. indeed, i did manage to squat on my piece fo floor in the alleyway with my legs going under the seats, or cross-leggged, in order to sleep for..oooh...15 minutes. The problem is the constant flow of people, trolleys, inspectors etc, so whenever i bothered to sit down on the floow, i had to get up to let someone past. Actually i consequently (in a dazed state) emptied my bag onto my bed, and dumped what was on my bed into the washing machine..

since that included my mobile phone (in the pile on my bed), i now have a broken mobile phone (to either fix or buy Sam's old one), hmm, talk about dumb. But its ok, cause the weekend was fantastic. We saw (just 1!) temple and lots of kung fu schools (heard of the Shaolin Monks?), climbed the holiest Taoist Mountain (Song Shan) which meant walking for 3 hours around the top of the mountain (not at the top) along a path cut into and often just built, hanging onto, the cliff. great fun and tiring and very, very, sweaty!

Since Rachel is also Jewish, we then went to Kaifeng (after spending a night in Zhengzhou -a surprisingly nice city) where there are a few hundred jews, to see the remains of the synagogue (a pot hole/well cover, in the boiler room of a hospital is all thats left!), a 1 room-special exhibit on the Jews of Kaifeng (so about 8 exhibits inside, most of which were copies of things taken by western countries for safe-keeping) and, well that was it, really. not much left of the jews now (although some do live there apparently).

We wondered how the jews came here, was it some jewish woman who had a family with a chinese guy and thus bred jewish kids? Was it a missionary-type settlement? Was it some Chinese who went to Israel, and somehow came back Jewish? well, the museum offered no answers.

both places were boiling hot (like beijing too, which will hit 38C tomorrow) but pollution-free..yay, beautiful, untouristy (apart from the kung-fu schools) etc.

This week I'll be talking to AIESEC, Lenovo, WWF and the Chamber about job opportunities -either for me or for other AIESEC trainees (hopefully). Which 1 will I do? stay tuned....