United again…

The day finally came… After 54 days apart it was time to see each other again and spend 14 days together in China – for the first time. China decided to welcome Danielle with open arms as we basically had sun, around 30 degrees and decent (it is never really good) air quality.

We started by celebrating our birthdays with good food, cake, balloons, red wine and everything you need for a good party. In the following days we did all the things we use to do together and had missed while we were apart, i.e.:
– Cook together and have long talks over good (imported) red wine
– Bike around town (Danielle got a nice little red bike in birthday present)
– Explore speciality food stores
– Talk and plan future travels

In the first weekend we had planned to join a couple of Carsten’s work colleagues (with family) to go hiking in the mountains east of Beijing. It is somehow amazing to live in a city with +10 million people and only have a couple of hours drive to deserted places in the most beautiful mountains. Contrasts are big in China…We had a really good weekend with hiking on the Great Wall. The first day we explored a repaired part of the wall which was very beautiful, but the second day turned out to be even more amazing as we did a 3 hour hike to a part of the wall which was not officially open for visitors and thus not repaired – a really great experience (see the photos from the hike) and quite impressive to imagine how they built this several thousand years ago.

In the second weekend we went to Beijing to experience our new capital :-). Beijing is a very different city from Tianjin. Tianjin is a rapid growing industrial city with few foreigners, while Beijing in some places has more non-Chinese citizens than native Chinese. This also means that Beijing has much more good restaurants, hotels, shops, sights etc. The combination of living in a “real” Chinese city with only a 30-minute train ride to Beijing is the perfect combination for us.

Anyway, we spent the whole weekend walking (as we always do) around Beijing and looked historical sites, ate at good restaurants and enjoyed the good weather. For once the air in Beijing was as clear as Copenhagen on a good summer day.

Two weeks passes by fast and now Danielle is back in Denmark. Hopefully, the job will be settled soon, so we can start our new life in China together for real…

Stay tuned for updates again soon…