Spring Festival Pictures

For those of you who are interested: a selection of pictures that we took during the Spring Festival holiday can be found here on Flickr.

National forest park Qi Shan

During the spring festival holiday, we drove to the Qi Shan (Qi mountain). Qi Shan National Forest Park is located to the southwest of Fuzhou city. It's an easy half hour drive from the city to the foot of the mountain. Once there, however, a 22 km extremely curvy and pretty steep and narrow road leads onto the mountain, to the park entrance. That 22 km road takes around 45 minutes, provided their are not many slow cars in front of you (sometimes they drive so slowly that walking up would have been faster for the passengers).

The tiring ride is rewarding, though. Qi Shan is a beautiful mountainous forest area with a few well marked wandering trails. You will be welcomed by many guides offering their service for around RMB 50 per two hours. It's not really necessary to use a guide, but if you want to concentrate on the beauty and not on the route, it's a good option. The park entrance is RMB20 per person. We took the three hour round trail, which leads past a couple of pretty spectacular water falls. You can even climb up to the highest one, with an extremely steep stairway (one way only: up).

We were lucky that the weather was beautiful (although cold) so we could enjoy a few very nice panoramas of the mountainous scenery.

After the long walk, we drove down the mountain again and had lunch in a famous "farmer food" restaurant at the foot of the mountain. This was an interesting place for itself. Many Fuzhounese come here in the weekend to eat, drink, sing karaoke, and play ma jiang. The food wasn't great, but the scenery and an empty stomach made up for that.

Conclusion: Qi Shan is good news for those of you who are afraid there isn't much to see or do around Fuzhou. Very nice!

Happy New Year ... again

The year of the rat -my year- has started. A quick reference to some online information about rat years shows that a rat year is a year for hard work, and renewal. But also of opportunity. A good year to start something new, like getting married (I am not aware of a year during which it was recommended not to get married, by the way) or starting a new venture. The latter appealed to me of course, because with the construction activities for our new factory well on the way, it seems to be the right year to build up our company. And with that, I expect a lot of hard work is waiting indeed!

But now we are enjoying the Spring Festival holiday. Two weeks during which most of the country is not working. Even most shops are closed, which is a rare occasion in China. Sadly, it's not the weather to do a lot outside. As you probably have heard or seen on the news, it's cold out here!!

So we are spending most of our time inside. A good opportunity to clean up and reorganize. Besides that, we do what most Chinese are doing: eating, watching TV, and watching fireworks. There is no way around that. And if the weather stays liks this, there should be some time left to write a bit more about what's going on in China, or more specifically in Fuzhou, during the Spring Festival 2008.