Additional Information

I’ve had a request for additional stories and photography from China. Also, I have just returned from the gym and when one has been working out they seem to have a little spring in their step and I am going to see if I can transfer that spring into my writing. So I apologise in advance if I get carried away and over emotionalise things.

First up. The image you see above is of a notebook/diary that I bought. From this point on I’m going to refer to it as a notebook. It is formatted like a dairy (it has days, months etc inside the book) but I don’t do a diary, so I have transformed the format into a kind of scribble pad. So far it’s being predominately used to teach myself Korean. It has an abundance of Korean letters, combination letters and then a series of basic, essential phrases. It also has the odd funny one liners or just quick notes of funny things to remind myself at a later date.

One thing that is worth a mention is this. I take a 30 minute walk to work, every day. On my way a number of airplanes fly over my head as they make their way to one of the nearby international airports. Giovanna and I were sitting in Incheon airport awating our flight to Beijing. I turned to Giovanna and said “I find it very thought provoking living on a flight path. It makes me think of how far I am from home, etc. It can be quite emotional at times”. Giovanna then replied with “Yeah there are loads of helicopters around where I live. The sound is a lot louder than usual”

Thank you and apologies to Giovanna, but I did say that it would make the blog.

Next up is a formation of red flags. These were flying simultaneously in Tinanmen Square. Red is the colour of Chinese New Year. It’s worn to fend of the bad things and welcome the new, well something like that. For the sake of this short paragraph lets refer to red as being used to scare off the bad. Throughout the course of our four days in China we discovered that everything that had been said, made, created, discovered, grown, invented, produced, designed etc etc etc is all in the name of scaring away the bad. I’m not joking. Our guide continuously said that this, that and this and that is from the ancient times and was used to push away the bad. Even the steps on the ground between rooms have some kind of significance to good/bad. Basically if you stand on it, then you will get bad luck. But that is only if it’s made of some kind of stone – oh I don’t know, it’s all too confusing, needless to say I didn’t stand on any steps. Another thing they do is this; on New Years Day itself everyone wears a completely brand new set of underwear and guess what colour the underwear is – RED. I was going to ask the guide if she was wearing red underwear, but I had to stop myself, as I wasn’t sure if she would firstly get my joke, and then if she would even appreciate it, after-all we had only been in China for about an hour.

Ok moving on. This picture is of a silk unwinding machine. I’m fairly confident that it has a more technical name, but I feel this will suffice. OK, I found out a very interesting fact about Silk worms and their cocoons. There is a staggering one mile of silk on just one cocoon. That’s crazy!!! Isn’t it???

That will do for now…….