Breaking The Shackles: The Spring Festival Vacation

The Spring Festival Vacation

I'm back with another picture post... The Spring Festival (Chinese New Year to some) came and went and these are the pictures I took from those 5 days I was gone. I went and met my girlfriend's family...I thought it was just going to be her Mom and Dad, but no I was wrong, it was her entire family. Quick things I can talk about since it's almost 4:00am... Lots of food - 3 large meals a day, cold - there was no heating at these houses, being unable to understand everyone due to a different dialect of Chinese being spoken, fun, and a cultural enriching experience. This is something not many foreigners get to experience, since it's a family thing, and unless you're invited into the home of a Chinese family, you'll never know what happens. There is an old wall in this city, kind of like Xi'an, I went to a museum - a very old and popular museum. I also picked wild strawberries. I thought I rotated the video at the end, but apparently it didn't save... Guess I'll be sitting here waiting for the upload again... Standby while that happens. This is taking too long to upload - it's now 4:35am, so I'll through the video up in another post tomorrow... I'm off to bed now! Enjoy the pictures.

UPDATE: For some reason when I add it to youtube, it goes back to being sideways - oh well, I'm giving up on trying to fix it.

UPDATE 2: Okay, after adding all the images and reformatting them again, I'm going to try and get this post published... Hopefully it will work this time. I'm getting tired of dealing with it.

UPDATE 3: How frustrating... I've now switched from the raw pictures to linking to my flickr page... Hopefully this will work this time? Maybe there were too many pictures - I don't know.

UPDATE 4: ... It didn't work - doing it manually, you'll miss a few pictures...

2008 Chinese New Year - Jingzhou

The next picture is probably my favorite... I think it's really "artsy" with the foreground standing out, and the background out of focus. I like it a lot!

She's writing my name on the wall with a rock...I didn't do it!

They didn't know about roasting marshmallows - glad I was able to share a part of our culture with them. They thought it was 'interesting' but these have a sweet fruit jelly in the center so it wasn't perfect.

This is a panoramic of part of the museum.

This is standing in front of the museum entrance.

Fireworks during the midnight hour of the Chinese New Year.

These are pictures from the Museum - sorry that some of them aren't that great... I wasn't sure if I could take pictures or not, so I was trying to do it sneakily. There were 'guards' around so I had to do it when they weren't looking.

This is supposedly a guy they found in a tomb from a very long time ago. His body was in perfect condition, movable joints, wet skin, hair was gone from a chemical in the coffin, and organs still intact. You can see his brain in the box at the top, and his intestines and stuff in the other box.

Here's where we picked wild strawberries - well it looked like they were grown here to be picked, so maybe not "wild" but close enough.

Here is a video I took while walking on the bridge...For some reason when I upload it to youtube fixed, it reverts back to being sideways - so I apologize about that.