Discovering the Far East

Some Saturday’s ago I visited a Cultural Exchange Festival with some friends, mainly because M-J was singing there.

Quite early in the morning we went to a park at the foot of the purple mountain. Fortunately the sun was shining, so there were quite a few Chinese visitors, although it was not overly crowded. The festival itself consisted of several foreign students in Nanjing that performed something related to China or to their own country, and some individual countries had a stall there.

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How I love this time of the year.

A dear friend of mine from the Netherlands just told me something that made me smile, and I would like to share it with you all. It is a tale from a children’s book called “A little fox in autumn”, and I really loved it.

A little fox is very worried about his favourite tree: all of its leaves are falling down! He is really upset and tries to tie the leaves to the branches, but at a certain moment they all have fallen, except for one last leave. The little fox decides to stay with the last leaf to protect it… But then that one falls down as well.

Our little fox is so upset that he cannot go to sleep, his poor tree lost all of his leaves!

As it gets colder, many little icicles appear on the tree. The little fox asks the tree: May the squirrel and the hedgehog borrow your leaves to stay warm in winter?”

As stiff breeze makes all of the icicles plink, making a laughing sound, and the branches nod a ‘yes’.

I think it is really touching, and I hope everyone of you enjoys his or her autumn days.

Please tell me about them!

One of the saddest places I have seen so far. That’s why I won’t write a lengthy article about it, I’ll just link to the wikipedia article and ask you to read it. As I was walking through the opened mass graves at the memorial side I could only come think of the holocaust. Sometimes it is really appalling what humans are capable of.

This statue says a lot, in my opinion.

Roelof

fucOn Saturday morning I decided that the previous day had been so wonderful that I wanted to go there again. Unfortunately entrance to the park costs 70 Kuai, so I decided to look for a free place that could match the tomb area.

The weather was not as nice as on Friday, but I had 20 seconds of sunshine that I used appropriately. (see the bottom of this post)

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This weekend the weather was really nice, on Friday a warm autumn sun shone on our heads and we (Jerry, Lisa and me) spontaneously decided to go to the purple mountain after class. We hopped on the bus which brought us up the mountain (30 min, 8 cent per person), and there we visited a scenic area called the Ming tombs.´

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