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Published: April 13th 2011
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Last Tuesday was Tomb-Sweeping day here in China. This is a festival where the graves of relatives are tended and visited in much the same way as we might do on the anniversary of a death. As well as being a day for this, it is also, in this part of the country at least, a day when people who have moved away from their home towns or their families, return to see them. Despite all of this, for me it just meant I had a few days off work. This all fitted in quite nicely as it came just as I was getting over my dependence on the toilet, as delicately described and documented last time, and it meant there was a chance to have a day or two exploring the city.
So, day one was the walls of the ancient city of Xiangyang, and for day two we went to the World War Two memorial from the Second Sino-Japanese conflict, after which I was somehow tricked into climbing a series of massive hills.
The city walls are, by all accounts, one of the only genuinely ancient parts of the old city. I couldn't tell you how long
they are right the way around, but it took us about two hours to walk it, so make of that what you will. The walk takes you through various beautifully kept pathways, mini-parks and gardens as well as a couple of old looking buildings, (of the type that if they'd been in any British city would now be studio apartments) and one rather iffy looking street - probably the first that I've seen here - which I was fairly pleased to get away from.
The one thing about a lot of these places, particularly the gardens and parks was that as beautiful as they were, they were all clearly very modern. In a sense this is good as it is easier to make them look clean and well looked after, but I love cities like York and Edinburgh for their old streets and steep, cobbled alleyways so the absence of any of that so far is a little disappointing.
One thing that was very impressive was the moat. I have never thought about moats as being things that could be impressive any more than a kettle or a desk-lamp can be. To me, they're just functional things that
are usually attached to very impressive looking things like old cities, castles and MP's houses. Even in terms of what they have at these types of places, it's just a moat, it's no maze or drawbridge so to describe it with that kind of adjective seems unnecessary; but it was, largely because it was massive! I have always thought of moats as being glorified trenches that I could clear with a decent run-up. Not this one, it was like a proper river. Well done, Xiangyang.
The river itself, which separates the old and new parts of the city, is called the Han River. I have decided - and have now told enough people to mean that I have to do it - that at some point this summer I will swim in it. This idea started because of a conversation I had in the street with a local called Bill (his English name) who boasted that it was one of the least polluted rivers in China - which to be honest is a little bit like boasting about being the World's thinnest obese man - and then when I saw people actually swimming in it and not dying, I
decided I had to give it a go. A while ago I said I wanted to swim in a river outside the UK, and while what I had in mind was a leisurely dip in The Nile or The Amazon, The Han will do fine as a starting point.
The following day, in the hope of finding something less exerting than walking around a big wall, we decided to climb a fairly small hill up to the memorial with absolutely no idea that, like huge Russian Dolls on a mantelpiece, there were five muddier peaks of ever increasing size attached to the back of this one, hidden just out of sight of the casual climbers. This basically meant that if you're stubborn about these sorts of things (hello) you have to carry on to the point where you reach the highest point or you haven't really climbed it, so that's what we did. We just carried on walking up, past various people in various stages of distress, some of whom looked as ready to collapse as Ballybriggs was after the Grand National on Saturday, and past others who were sitting with those 'shoot the air-rifle at the balloon' or
'throw the ball at the tin cans' fairground games, which seemed odd and out of place in the extreme but people seemed to be going for it.
Chinese tradition is that when you reach the top of a mountain you are supposed to shout at the top of your voice to mark your achievement, as far as I'm concerned if anyone who climbed what we climbed had any breath left with which to do this, then they didn't do it properly.
The views from the top were beautiful and even with the thick layer of smog that permanently covers the city and stops us from seeing these same mountains from our flat, we could see quite a few other tree filled hills that, pleasingly, looked markedly bigger than what we had just struggled up.
These hills, as well as looking like things you would not expect to find within a ten minute drive of a city of half a million people, also looked like the pictures I remember seeing in Geography textbooks where I imagined then that the Pandas must live. Obviously that's absolute rubbish because they, or at least most of them, live about seventeen hours
away from here, which if anything, probably made my repeated questions of "Well do they live on that one, then?" even more annoying.
On getting back into the city I rewarded myself with a snack. Many of the bakeries here sell little profiterole type things that are amazing. If you don't know what a profiterole is, it's a kind of soft pastry, about the size of a golf ball that is filled with whipped cream. In England they are the preserve of decent restaurants, they come covered in melted chocolate and are usually pretty expensive. Here you can buy them like Pick 'n' Mix. I got a bag of thirty five, albeit, without the chocolate, for 60p and finished them in about an hour and a half - definitely an achievement worth shouting from the top of a mountain about.
Pura Vida.
Dave
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kimby
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i love how you sign off with pura vida! keep bloggin!!