Long time no see and new blog - again...

Hello everybody!

As you can see I have, again, moved my blog. Wordpress was unfortunately not very user-friendly here in China, but it could have been just our crap internet connection. Even with a VPN address it sometimes did not want to connect to site due to ' safari cannot connect to the page with a secure connection" or whatever it was. Anyhow, I got tired of not being able to write whenever it suited me and not if I had access to the blog, so here we are now at blogspot.com, WELCOME! ;-D

And, by the way - I have finally installed a VPN address on my own computer, so now I can access everything I want ( I hope) going around all the webpages the chinese have blocked...

So, it has been a while. First, after christmas I just forgot about my blogging, and then I suffered from the "I'll do it tomorrow"-disease. But now I am back, and I thought that I would start by sharing some fun photos from our doings here...

Fireworks at the Chinese new year. Happy New Dragon Year everybody!!! You can by firework everywhere on the street in the weeks up to the new year, and this was just half of everything we lit up during new year. Magnificent, isn't it?

Lantern festival. The end celebration of the chinese new year, sort of... Here we are outdoors in the park where they had build a whole carnival  with lights, signs, loud music, street food, live music, fireworks and what not. From left to right: Laura from Australia, Inga from Latvia, Tarvi from Estonia, me, Pia from Finland, Peter from Hungary, Ashley's little sister, and Ashley. Tarvi, Pia and Peter are Sam's colleagues, Inga is Tarvi's girlfriend who work as an english teacher here in Rizhao, Laura is Inga's colleague, and Ashley is a chinese girl who just have become a part of our group along the way.

More lights and signs...

In March we had a black tie party at our new pub in Rizhao: and we dressed accordingly! All girls went to a wedding shop and hired some dresses, had hair and makeup done, and then it was Party-Party!!! We started at Inga's place with some pizza and drinks, and then went to the Muse Pub, and danced all night long... Just for measurement: the hiring of dress + hair and makeup was only 100 RMB, which is about 12 euro... I think that we will be doing it again!

In April there was formula 1 in Shanghai. Sam's nephew Oliver was here visiting us, and they took the opportunity to go and have a look at the fast cars around the track. I spend the few days in Shanghai looking at galleries and other nice stuff...

And you can't have a drink in Shanghai on the formula weekend without some nice drinks from the formula lady...

...or have a nice big pizza in the old french quarters where you can find both great western and oriental food.

More parties, this time Elvis party. We started at a teppanyaki restaurant (japanese food), and ended up at the Muse bar again. This time though I have some nice pictures of our cook making our food straight in front of us. Here he was frying some rice...

...and here he was grilling some oysters. This was really a really nice restaurant, and I know that we will be visiting it again. Everything we order was just amazing, and it was really nice looking at how the cook handled his spatulas.

And finally a picture from our favorite Beijing Duck restaurant. This is the place we go to when we want some really nice chinese food, and they have the best Beijing duck in this town! We go there quite regularly, and very convenient for us since the restaurant is across the street from where we live. ;-)

So, this was it for this time. The party section... 

I have also been traveling with Inga to Hunan province where I have been looking at some awesome mountains and an old chinese town, and then I have to get you updated on my studio work... so there will be more posts really soon with a lot of photos!!!

Have a really nice time until then, see ya!