Suzhou

Christmas in Suzhou and New Years celebration still to come!

Happy New Year to everyone, even if we actually have not been celebrating New Year yet here in China. That will happen the 9th of next month, and then we will be celebrating for 2 whole weeks... and we will be entering the year of the snake! So everybody who was born in the years 1917, 1929, 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001 or this year: It is your year thats coming up!!

This year we celebrated christmas south in Suzhou. Sam and yours truly were the only ones left in Rizhao for the holidays. The plan was to stay in Rizhao as Sam had to work on christmas day, but luckily they got everything done before christmas. And when our friends heard this we got invited to Suzhou to celebrate christmas there! We also had an invitation from earlier to celebrate christmas with our other friends Pim and Yandie in Shanghai, so it meant double fun for us! First we stayed a night in Shanghai and spent one and a half day eating and chatting with them (yes, eating! Shanghai means italian food, western bread, salami, real cheese and everything else that we cannot get here in Rizhao...) and watched them making the new Shanghai Tower as a ginger bread house (being build as we speak in Shanghai, at 632m it will be the tallest building in China when finished, and the second tallest building in the world Link). 

After that we took the train west to Suzhou, and spend christmas eve with Staffan and his family. Suzhou is a city with 8-10 million people about half an hour by train from Honqiao airport in Shanghai. 

Sam in the waiting hall of Honqiao train station.

Honqiao trainstation. It is not only in USA that everything is big...

Railway. Our train this time was a normal train with an average speed of 290 km/h. Almost as smooth as the maglev train between Pudong airport and Shanghai city that comes up to an average speed of above 400 km/h.

Outside our hotel they had these beauties for hire... A 'dragon' Ferrari and a Maserati.

The view from our hotel room. Suzhou is one of those cities that has been totally rebuild and modernized in the last ten years, and not much of the old 'China' is left. 

This was the 'entrance' to our hotel room! The bed and big window is behind my back, and the door into the hotel room is behind the bathtub... We felt almost like royalty ;-)

One of the few buildings of old Suzhou that has been preserved. This was a temple in the middle of the old shopping street.

Studio update:

I have been painting on several paintings at once the last few weeks, and a few of the backgrounds that I have shown earlier is now in the stage of getting the bird painted in. For some reason many of them has become much darker and more somber of color than I had planned. Some experiments has worked out better than others, but I will finnish them all all the same. Later I have to decide if I have to paint some of them again with a different background.  The Blue-tit from my last post is almost finished, and there is just some minor details left to do, like the feet and so. (picture bottom right)

And then a page from my art-journal. I am doing an art trade with a girl from the US. I will paint her a Magpie, and she will make two jewelry pendants for me. This is the sketch I did from her own photo of a magpie, and when I get the thumbs up I will start the painting on canvas.