It´s been a long time since our last post. And you may have even wondered if we are still in Shanghai? Sure, we still are, and still we are having a great time over here in the middle kingdom.
But time been a bit short since I started working as photographer therefore this blog has fallen a bit behind. I´m terribly sorry!
There are still so many little adventures in our ever day life in Shanghai. All would be worth sharing with you. Like yesterday when we went to the park for Hannah to play and over sudden had to make sure that she would not have her head chopped of by "Tai-Chi-with-sword-practicioners".appearing over sudden on the pit.
But today we want to share with you our most recent BIG one.
Last weekend, in honor of Paul´s 40th birthday, we decided to explore the middle of China and booked short notice tickets to the Zangjiajie mountains in Hunan province.
It is a national park (Wulingongyuan) and about a 2 hours flight west from here. The area got some fame when the movie "Avatar" came out: The director got the inspiration for the Floating mountains from this landscape. If you know the film:You actually find the "Halleluja" Mountains" there!
It´s been the most amazing trip we did in China! We haven´t seen that much nature in the entire time we have stayed here.
We spent 3 full days hiking around in the area there and wish we could have stayed on longer.
Only couple of things made our trip a bit of a challenge.
For example that despite we went TO a Tourist attraction, we actually turned out to BE the Tourist attraction. I was almost about to write a sign: "No Foto! No Touching! I´m not a Monkey in the Zoo" and attach it to Hannah´s carrier.
Yes, we are very proud of our sweet little daughter. But even as mother you can hear only so many times "Aaaahhh, soo sweet.."Ahhh so cute"...beautiful.."..and that times hundrets a day - usually involving groups of Young Girls shrieking out when they saw our Little Girl on one of our backs.
It was simply impossible to be in a crowd of People and to enjoy the view. But after 3.5 years living here we have learnt how to cope with it. And the only strategy is HUMOUR.
Luckily on our second day we found a track where we didn´t meet anyone for about 2 hours! (It felt almost a bit scary) Why? Well, if we would have been able to read the map we probably wouldn´t have taken it either. It was a two hour down hill climb on stairs, covering 4000meters in length and, about 600 meters in hight (a sign told us in English once we had reached the bottom with our worn knees and leg muscles and met everyone else who had just taken the bus from where we had started)
Nevertheless, not beeing able to understand and read can also bring the most fun adventures to you. This way we got to enjoy an amazing quiet walk, right next to the "Hallelujah" mountains. And the day before we found ourselves in the most amazing cave we had ever seen. A 2km Underground walk, 800meters boat ride, waterfalls and a fantastically lit Underground world.
Enough words I think. Time to Show you some of our pictures
Click HERE to see our photoalbum
