Qingdao: beer, beach and horses

finally finished loading almost 200 photos from two cameras (more coming) and for Robina to fill in the captions.
Robina's friend, Shirley demonstrating how to quaff beer. Robina returned with a nice brown tan and more beer consumed over one weekend than the whole past year! not surprising since Qingdao, a former German colony had inherited the beer industry as well.
local guys showing real men must have beer belly!
She had a fun but tiring time from the intense riding sessions, including the usual arena riding, trail riding and the more fun, beach riding. I think she enjoyed riding in the sea the most which was the most fun n games part.
Qingdao rocky beach. the real sandy beach and seafood was great as well, since we don have much of both here in landlocked Beijing.

check out this set for the photos. we got another installment of trail riding photos but that will come later since it's on another CD.

Robina at Qingdao

Robina just returned from Qingdao with her riding school friends for a horse-riding weekend. Qingdao is a summer vacation spot for Beijingers, famous for its beach, seafood and Qingdao Beer! Robina is now very tanned from the beach riding but she complained her riding skills have went out of the window. Due to the warm reception from the Shandong locals, their weekend was a blur from the Qingdao beer.

We are now processing the loads of photos taken. a more detailed post will follow later!

Niu Jie Mosque in Beijing

Robina and I visited Niu Jie (Ox Street) mosque in Beijing. Niu Jie is a muslim neighbourhood in South part of Beijing. It has a huge muslim supermarket which all sorts of halal foodstuff, a muslim secondary school, the mosque and an islamic college. The mosque is the oldest (built in AD996!) and largest mosque in Beijing.
We visited together with the Chinese Culture Club and a mosque elder was there to show us around. We had visited the mosque in 2004 and it underwent a major renovation in 2005. now the mosque has even more facilities and beautifully refurbished. it's very interesting comparing the differences and similarities with the mosque in Singapore and Southeast Asia. imagine a mosque that looks like a Chinese temple! the blend of Chinese and Arabic muslim cultures are very exotic!
before the mosque visit, we had lunch at a muslim restaurant at Niu Jie (Turpan 吐鲁番餐厅 83164691 83160247), the food was cheap and good! I love their lamb kebab (羊肉串). Robina found a Uighur girl at the restaurant very pretty!

yo brother!

an "awwwww" moment!

Sally used to love the kittens in her next door crate at the pet shop in Taipei (when we sent her there for bathing or short stays). I think she would like to keep a kitten as pet but the kitty would probably freak out. Sally has no love lost for adult cats in the garden though. she likes to chase them up a tree.

Jen in Beijing

Peck Wai and Adrian came up to Beijing last week. While Adrian was hard at work, Robina brought Peck Wai out to shop, tailor cheongsam and drink tea. I chose the makan joints. here we are at a Tunisian place having mint tea and couscous. the food is Mediterranean style and very healthy since its steamed in a claypot "Tagine".
feta cheese salad on top, lamb and chicken, with steamed veggies on a bed of couscous!

Sally and Jovien

Jovien came over to our place in the afternoon. she had a nap while Sally stood guard over her. after Jovien woke up it was Sally's turn for a snooze.

I wan one too!

hilarious! seen on cult of mac. see here for captions.

gong si mi?

what talking you?

While playing with Sally and complaining about Sally's recent bout of refusal to eat her pellets, Robina told me about her theory that Sally can recognise certain key phrases in Mandarin compared to English. I disagreed and believed that Sally was responding to Robina's tone or subtle cues in her speech. I told Robina about Hans the talking horse. that degenerated into me trying to get Sally to respond to the computer voice from the MacBook and Robina trying to get her phone to speak Mandarin. Well, Sally did not learn to speak like these dogs, but Robina found out that her Nokia phone can speak Cantonese (for some strange reason) and can pronounce "Sivasothi" clearly.