But, as I said, today was another day off. He Shuai, who is our main contact here, very kindly took me to the Henan (province) Museum, and also for a hot-pot. Yes, that's right. But not like what we're used to. You'll see from the pictures, a little later. It was "hot" in more ways than one, too. As I found to my cost not half an hour ago. Still, the less said about that the better! Here we go, starting with a few shots outside the museum.
Don't let the dull grey sky and the warm clothing fool you - the temperature was in the 20's (C). For some reason, though, you feel you want to wear coats. It looks as though it ought to be cold. But that "fog" almost certainly isn't: have you ever seen fog when it's that warm? It's got to be air-borne pollution. Which should come as no surprise. But it's not all bad news on that front: my hotel has low-energy light bulbs, and almost all the motor scooters seem to be battery-powered. Bear in mind that they outnumber cars by a considerable margin. OK, I suppose the batteries will be re-charged from a coal-fired electricity grid, but at least they're taking it seriously.
Now, this is what's meant by "hot-pot" in China:
The centre dish has a mild, unspiced cooking mixture (the milky liquid). The outer liquid is oil, water, chillies, various peppers etc. There is a gas burner underneath. You drop in the various items of food, let them cook, then dip them in a garlic-sesame-seed-oil paste and eat. Yummy! Shuai ordered two portions of everything. We only managed one between us.
Above: preparing "special noodles".
The museum was most impressive, by the way. It's a large building on three floors. You can imagine how much stuff they have there. It begins in pre-historic times and continues to chart the all the dynasties right up to the last one, which just about overlapped Victoria's reign.
Sorry, there are no pictures from that. But in the afternoon there was a recital in teh museum of traditional Chinese music on traditional Chinese instruments (naturally). We got great front-row seats.
I took a couple of video clips but the shorter of the two is over 100Mb so unfortunatley I can't upload it. Unless anyone knows of an easy way of compressing them? They are .AVI files.
In the evening, after dinner (the humble noodles) I decided to stroll down towards town with my camera to try and capture a few night-lights.
Above: according to a colleague, who shall remain nameless, the "pointy thing" is a children's museum. He knows this because he has visited it. He says he didn't count how many children there were. (I don't write 'em all, you know!)
It was exactly at this point, approximately 20-minutes from the hotel, that the lunchtime hot-pot began to demand attention. So it was a nerve-racking-traffic-dodging double-quick march back!
We'll stop there, I think!
Bye for now
(Zai Jian)
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