Drinking China

Well, we meant to write yesterday but were too tired to...
I came home at ten and I was so knackered that I just ate and went to bed.
And today, i've got my afternoon free and i was thinking of writing for the blog but the internet's been cut off and it should be so for another week...
So if you get this message, that means I managed to send it from the office.Today I am going to give you a little taste of China...
Giving you a small sample of the funny things we've found in supermarkets here.We'll start with the drinks!
China is like no other place I've been too on that level. I already tried a lot of funny asian drinks before coming here, herbal jelly drinks, exotic fruit drinks and all, but there is such a wider variety here that you could not try everything even if managed to survive the experience after a month.Our first mistake was to be fooled by the meaning of the words they use.
When a chinese says (or writes) Beer or Wine, that doesn't actually mean it IS beer or wine.
For example, they've got Lychee beers which are no beers, and so do they with orange and pineapple beers. All of these are fuzzy drinks but I seriously doubt they've got any element that could classify them in the beer category.
Then, although the ones i quoted so far are not frankly good nor bad, we have to give a special prize for the BLUE DIAMOND beer, that's got a lemon pictured on it but actually tastes slightly of lychee and is quite a pleasant drink.
On the photograph, only the can on the left is actually a real beer.
We were also surprised by the fact that we saw people drinking alone big beers, even bigger than the usual russian ones...
Units are all messed up here, they use ml but you can't find two bottles with the same quantity: 642, 500, 450, 466m...Their small cans of coke or else are of 345 or 350ml.
But the good thing to say is that their beer are very light in alcohol, from 3 to 4 most of the time, but they don't taste as bland and watery as all these fashionable summer or trendy beers like Brahma or Baltika Colours...
I can't say they're fantastic beers but then again I only tried the casual ones.
You should know that a half liter beer costs about 0,20 cents. Yes. China is a good place to live. : )
About wine: They call wine both the thing WE call wine and the rice alcool and liquors they make.
That means drinking a bottle of wine can mean you're going to taste some chinese wine or roll under the table with some of their 50 degrees wine alcohols...Next post: The soft drinks...
Yes, i even taste those.

Monday 11th of September

Just writing the date in the title reminds me of terrible memories: an ordinary day for us, the gloomiest anniversary for many.
Anyway, that wasn't what I had been thinking of when i decided to write today's post.
It's going to be pretty hard writing everyday because we're really busy with work and really tired after that.
So... Yesterday's been the first day we took the time to go and see some touristic bits. After taking 3-4 buses, we got close to a small taoist temple, which marked our first steps into a taoist building.
We had seen plenty of buddhist Datsans in Buryatia and Mongolia, but the taoist style is really quite different. And the priests we saw there had really long beard and were dressed partly like kung-fu heroes you see in movies.
The weather was grey as most days -pollution is heavy here- so I'm not sure we'll have nice photographs to post but we'll try to do so when we have time.
Then we went to the Yellow Crane Tower, "one of the 40 most interesting places in China", and it was indeed quite impressive and it's a very beautiful site. Unfortunately, we came late and only had two hours to visit it. I would advice any visitor to come around noon, bring a picnic and stay the whole afternoon there. The architecture is a delight and it's very green and pretty.
We felt quite sad when we heard that the Pass for 12 months was only available to chinese citizens. That's bad luck, the entry fee is really expensive: 50 yuan and the Pass is only 60 yuan.
I argued with the lady because they actually had the cruelty to write everything about this Magic Pass in English, forgetting to mention that it was exclusively reserved to Chinese...
Anyway.
When we got home, we noticed that our pet, Lucy the Praying Mantis, was behaving strangely, as if she was going to give birth to a second cocoon. But Now it's been a whole day since then and she's just staying close to her first cocoon and seems much more relaxed than yesterday.
we shou

Introduction

A couple. He is french-she is russian.
We moved two weeks ago to Wuhan, China, where we will be teaching for a year.
With this blog, we intend to share our impressions, feelings and discoveries about Wuhan, China and all things. This is mainly intended for friends and family and might be written in english, russian or french but you are all welcome here and we will always be pleased to read your comments and to get to know new people.
We hope you'll enjoy sharing this experience with us.
Posting soon...
Orelena