Three weeks full of surprises

Where are the pictures from Seoul? Wasn't there suppose to be an update in this blog every week? Well, I had some good reasons why I wasn't able to write. The last three weeks were full of surprises...negative and positive!

It all started on May 4th, three days before my planned departure to Seoul: My laptop bag was stolen during a client's dinner in Changzhou. Laptop, passport, and wallet (incl. credit cards) were gone! The guy that stole the bag was caught on camera (there is a camera in every corner of China ;), but the police was not able to find him.
Anyway, I took me two weeks to get everything organized: new Laptop, new passport, and getting access to my money again. I thought everything can be replaced but then I realized that all my pictures that I took in China were on that laptop! After one week of despair I found out that the pics were saved on a company backup (even though this backup usually doesn't allow to backup images). That really made my day!

There was another result of the theft: Since I have an emergency passport now I'll have to leave the country within 30 days. That means I'll go back home on June 9th! I'm pretty happy about this! Initially I should have stayed until the beginning of July and they wanted me to extend my stay until the end of November, but coming back in the beginning of June sounds just right. I'm quite happy to come back home!

So what's up in the remaining time? If nothing extraordinary happens I'll go to Huangshan next week to see the Yellow Mountains, which are supposed to be the most beautiful mountains in China. The weekend after, my brother Martin will visit me and I'll do my third round of sightseeing in Shanghai. I'll then leave Shanghai on June 9th and arrive back in Leipzig the next day. But just if everything goes as planned, of course :).

Below you can see some random pics from Shanghai and Changzhou, and a team event we had this weekend.

One last recommendation from my side: Backup everything, things can get lost faster than you think ;)!

Shanghai, Beijing and Hangzhou!

Finally some time to write about what has happened during the last two weeks: Before and after the Formula One Race Thea and me did mainly sightseeing in Shanghai. We saw the famous Nanjing Road, visited the Shanghai museum and the Shanghai Exhibition Center, saw the Pudong side with the tall skyscrapers, went to a tiny part of the old Shanghai called Qibao and went to the beautiful Yuyuan Garden.

After three more days of Shanghai we took the overnight train to Beijing. After a 10 hour ride we arrived in the capital of China. We stayed at the Happy Dragon Hostel, which was really cozy with a nice bar, where we got to know quite a lot of people from all over the world. The first day we visited the Forbidden City, the Tienanmen Square and the Temple of Heaven Park. The second day we visited the Summer Palace, which is incredible! Beautiful landscape and a lot of old temples! On the third day we saw a part of the Chinese wall, which was probably the best part of our trip! It's hard to believe how huge that wall is and we only saw a little part of it! On the last day we saw the Lama temple and the Olympia Park.

After one last relaxing day one week ago Thea had to leave and I had to go back to work.

This weekend was a long weekend. Because the May Holiday was a Sunday we got another free day today! They should start doing that in Germany ;).
Anyway I went to Hangzhou on a day trip yesterday and it was...too crowded!! I've read in many travel guides that you should not travel on a Chinese holiday but this was the worst I've ever seen! The lake in Hangzhou itself is really beautiful but with 100,000 to 200,000 people around it, it simply doesn't feel as nice.

The rest of the week I'll be in Changzhou for work and the coming weekend I'll fly out to Seoul to (hopefully) get the right visa this time.

Enjoy the pics and stay tuned :).

Hangzhou:



Beijing:



Shanghai: