Our Last Day in Tianjin and China

Nick in front of the Buddhist temple with the 1000 jade buddhas.

Our Last Day in Tianjin and China
Today was our last day here. As all the other days it was fully organised and packed with activities. I think there is this feeling of obligation to pack us much into our days as possible so that we get a lot of bang for our buck. Unless it is designed to keep us busy and therefore out of trouble…?!?
We were organised into English and non English speakers this morning to go into an appropriate bus so we could understand the tour guide. On bus number 1 were limited seats so Helen and Jenny together with the Buchanan family went onto a Chinese speaking bus, as Helen and Jenny both understand most of the language and the Buchanans were here two years ago and had already been to the sites they were going to take us to today.
So us, the Ewens clan, were put with the Aussie group and hopped onto the bus that we thought was for English speakers, turned out that wasn’t the case, however we had the two lovely English speaking ladies on board with us who have a business degree and are there to help whenever possible to whoever needed it. Their names are Ada and Eva and they translated for us on the bus and then walked with us around all the sites, which meant we had our own personal tour guides with very good English. But wait there is more…the friendly plain clothed police officer was on board with three of his colleagues and they were also keen to walk with us.
The first site we were taken to was a Buddhist temple which was built in 2003 but in the same colours and style like the old palaces etc. It was a beautiful building in the traditional walled outlined with the buildings along the line of the wall and a big open space in the middle with the main temple in it.
This temple houses 1000 jade buddhas! They came in all sizes and while most of them were sitting, there was also a statue of the sleeping buddha…this is a special one as this depicts him towards the end of his life, shortly before he reached Nirvana.

The Sleeping Buddha.

Amongst our Chin Woo colleagues is a Swiss participant who has a Chinese wife (who in an ex Chin Woo coach from Shanghai and who was one of the judges), her mother and their 2 year old daughter. They happen to enter the temple at the same time as us and the little girl took one look at the Buddha statue and then threw herself on the kneeling stool, put her hands into prayer position and bowed. She had clearly seen him before! Buddha that is. The mother and Grandmother proceeded to do the same and when I asked her she told me that they are Buddhists and the little girl was used to going to temple.
Ben, Nick and Tessa were very interested in the fact that the little girl knew what to do and I must say she looked very cute doing it.
You can imagine that she was kept very busy with a collection of 1000 Buddha statues, as in any other building she entered she did the same thing!! Luckily in some buildings there was one main Buddha to pray to and lots of little ones lining the walls on shelves that didn’t all needed to be acknowledged.
It was a very peaceful place and is actively being used by the local Buddhist community.
After this we went to this extraordinary housing complex that in the Ching (or something like that) dynasty belonged to one family. A very rich family as the complex covers an area the size of a village. At some point it was donated to the government (yeah right…?!) and it is now a museum and a commercial area with lots of little shops set up inside the complex. I asked about the descendants of the family and apparently they still have a couple of houses on the piece of land where they live now.

Our wonderful friendly plain clothed police officer/personal body guard outside the ancient housing complex.

Like in the other palaces we have been the decoration and ornaments are very rich and engravings are everywhere in the stones and most importantly around entrances into a new area within the complex. The door had two carvings above it that made it look like tiger eyes with the door itself looking like the opening of the tiger’s mouth, all to ward off evil spirits. The ladies quarters had the image of the phoenix bird in many places as this represented the feminine and women in the ancient days, while the male quarters had dragons everywhere which stood for power and strength.
There was a home theatre room with beautiful old wooden chairs all set out to watch a show on stage with room for 50 or so people. There were reception rooms, offices, maid quarters, a bridal room was laid out, the daughter’s quarters and many pretty court yards.
Clearly an exceedingly wealthy family who used to live there. I should have asked why they moved out and when…next trip.
After this we were taken to lunch and yes it was a banquet and yes there was a lot of food wasted. Oh, and when we arrived at the restaurant I took the children straight to the bathroom instead of sitting down and by the time we came out our Kiwi team mates felt obliged to give our seats up to part of the American team and so we ended up sitting with four, this time uniformed, police officers at a corner table. They thought it was brilliant sitting with the children and so did the boys in particular. The officers took turns picking out the best bits of food of the platters for the children and filling their glasses up with Sprite. They have had more Sprite in the last two weeks than at all the birthday parties combined they have ever been to.
After this we were driven to the ‘Ancient Cultural Street’ which was again built in the old style, old stone streets, wooden structures and and those lovely Chinese roofs. We were left to our own devices for two hours. On the bus on the way there the tour guide mentioned to look after our bags as it can get busy in those streets and Nick said something to Ada and Eva that he would feel safe if the police officer walked with us, which she promptly translated and we then had five personal body guards for the next two hours.
Ada, Eva and I walked in front, they followed us in a half circle with a few paces distance and as soon as the children wanted to look into one of the little shops one of them was sent after them to look out for them. It really wasn’t a dangerous or threatening place at all what so ever and in a way it was comical but also very sweet of the guys and they sure took their jobs seriously. Tessa walked a bit ahead of us and our main friend immediately pointed at her and said something to one of his men and he sped up and shadowed her without Tessa even noticing.
The other Kiwis were doing their own thing as they had been on a different bus and at some point our coach caught up with them there (he had done his own thing this morning, I think he went to see his in-laws who are from Tianjin) and they walked towards us. Apparently he immediately spotted the guys as cops and asked Helen in our group why they were guarding us. And Jenny who speaks some Mandarin told me later that some of the local people had asked if they can take photos with the kids and the friendly police man had told them ‘no’.
Anyway we didn’t spend much money, in fact we only bought one bag of sweets. There wasn’t really much that we wanted or needed and a couple of the things that the boys liked (swords for example) were just not practical to cart around the world and the same went for the tea pots and cups that I saw.
The sweets were 5 yuen which is NZ$1 so it was one of the cheapest shopping outings ever and also one of the more interesting ones. Nick later offered the sweets around the police men and then also a shop keeper who stood close by. This in turn delighted that man he gave each of the children a small round item which turned out to be a squash that was designed to be swirled around in your hand for relaxation and apparently it can bring happiness, too. So there!
When we came back to the hotel Ben gave his police friend a NZ key ring with a Kiwi bird on it and Eva explained to him what the Kiwi stood for.
Then we said our good byes.
In our program it said we were meant to have a river cruise this evening at 19:30 but I had already decided that we won’t go to that as our bus leaves tomorrow morning for Beijing at 6:30am. The children, and in particular Ben who likes boats were a bit disappointed with that, but late this afternoon it turned out this trip had been cancelled, so that made my decision easier and the children didn’t feel they were missing out on anything.
We decided to forgo the hotel dinner tonight and instead went across the road to a dumpling house. “Yeah” I hear Bonnie and Kylie call out, “finally some dumpling news”. The place didn’t disappoint and we had four different types of dumplings, all fried and I must say the traditional pork and chives one won out big time. Spicy chicken doesn’t really go so well in dumplings in my opinion and the beef I think was in fact lamb, which isn’t my favourite dumpling flavour either. But pork was very good.
Oh, and on other food news, while we were sitting there Ngaroma asked me if I had that dish at the hotel the other day that looked like meat but when she started eating it she realised that the meat pieces had the distinct shape of tiny feet. No I had not seen that but after the dumpling dinner we went back to the hotel where the dinner we were meant to have had kind of finished but the buffet was still out, so we went to grab some water melon and a cup of tea when Ngaroma called me over as she had spotted the same dish again and sure enough on closer inspection there were tiny feet in the pot…Helen went to enquire and it turns out they were sparrow feet!!!!!
On one level I really admire the ability of Chinese chefs to turn just about anything into food and tasty food, too. Nothing ever seems to go to waste, except of course all the food that does go to waste in those banquets in order to be hospitable. But otherwise anything that grows (we had sea cucumber on offer the other night, too) or moves can be cooked and eaten!
Right, suitcases are packed, I better go to bed so that the wake up call at 5:30am doesn’t give me a heart attack and the next time I will be writing in this space it will probably be from Germany!!!
Wow, what an exciting two weeks we have had and more adventures lie ahead of us…
Good night and good bye from China
Tanja
xx