ולסיום, סיומת

זהו. הגיע הזמן לסיים את הטיול. אנחנו כבר בבית, התיקים כבר בארון, וכל השטויות שהבאנו כבר מפוזרות ברחבי הבית, פחות או יותר. שאול אפילו הוריד את הזקן שלו.
מאו החתול החמוד נשאר חמוד, וחוצמזה שאר המציאות היא אותה המציאות, על כל מה שיש בה.
היה לנו טיול נהדר. היה כיף להגשים עוד חלום ישן שכבר חשבנו שלא נגשים.

זהו, אין צורך להרחיב יותר מדי כי באמת כבר כתבנו הכל (חוצממה שהדף לא סובל, והיה לא מעט מזה) ולכן נסתפק בהעלאת תמונות קצרה. בחרנו כמה שנחשפות כאן לראשונה, ושופכות אור בעיקר עלינו. מין רגעים קטנים ופרטיים שלנו, שרצינו לחלוק.

תודה לכל אלה שדאגו לנו והעבירו את זמננו בנעימים בשהותנו בארצות נכר, ותודה לכל מי שקרא ונהנה, או שלא נהנה.

טיולים נעימים לכולנו, וימים טובים שיבואו עלינו.
בלוגטיול נסגר בזאת באופן רשמי, אם כי לא מצער.

לשנה הבאה בסנטיאגו דה-קומפוסטלה!!!

Photo Finish

Well my darlings, as Bluma Shperling used to say, this is our last post from remote China. Our backpacks our packed and we're waiting for our flight. It's some hours away so we just sit in the hostel till we take a cab to the airport and then we'll sit there for a while.

the last four days were just exhausting - we planed on doing more sightseeing than shopping but somehow it just turned out the other way around. Now we hope not to get overweighted and that we go through the customs back home without any problems (oh yes, we're gonna smuggle some stuff...).

This trip has been amazing, no less. We came to realize that just 10% of it were sightseeing and the rest 90% were a total 5-senses experience. All the things we saw, the cultural differences, the funny people and their customs, the way they live their lives, the landscapes, the art, the roads, the animals (live or cooked and fried), the other travellers, the Israeliada, the holidays (both chinese and ours), being away from home in a strange country for so long (while a mini-war going on), forgetting about the university and work but still keeping it at the back of our heads, and all the very very complicated and hard to explain food struggle, all of these were just amazing, and we probably will cherish a lot of it for many years.

And there's all the neat stuff we bought.

So this is it. It's not a real sum-up because the official one, the post that will lock this TripBlog till the next one will open uo, will appear in a few days, in Hebrew, from the very much loved and missed Jerusalem.

Thank you all for listening, and for talking back, it's been our great pleasure.

p.s
And no, no photoes on the photo-finish because the damn computer doesn't read our USB drive. Oh well.

Shopping

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This is actually harder than we thought it would be. we've been shopping all day long, and we literarly are falling from our feet. but hey, tomorrow we gonna shop some more, so who cares.

We spent the day at the Silk Market, which has very little silk on sale but lots of other stuff (electronics, clothing and many other things). everything is very cheap, after you bargain like a crazy israeli, and everything is very much fake. They fake everything, they even fake fake things. They will fake their mother if they thought they would be able to sell her.

Anyway, that's all for now. Maybe tomorrow, if we come back in a decent hour we upload some pictures. And maybe not. Tomorrow is EREV SUKOT so we might pay a visit to Beit Chabad's Suka, but we'll see about that.

Take care and HAG SAMEACH!

Is it really the End??

Well, No. At least, not yet.

We came back to Beijing, our last and really final stop on the trip map. Since we're already paid the city a 5 days visit in the beginning of this voyage, we decided to dedicate the next 4 days just to relaxing, and more important - for SHOPPING!!

We got to Beijing after a 22 hours long train ride, in the least expensive class of the non air-conditioned, very very local-people's train, from Shanghai. It was an educational experience, to spend the "night" in a train full of Chinese people on thier way to their capital to celebrate the nation's birthday week. One can't really grasp the complete meaning of the term "full" untill one gets to China. These people aren't kidding, when they want to fill up a train they do it untill there's no room to get from your seat to the window next to you. Nirit went to the toilet in the middle of the night, almost got lost on the way, and got back after 1 hour. Since it was the slowest train to Beijing it stopped in no less than 20 stops during the trip, most of them during the night, and the people, and their numerous bags, just kept on flowing in. Watching them stand in long lines on the stations' platforms, running as hard as they can, thinking they could get a little space for themselves and their huge bags of potatos or something, we didn't know whether to laugh at them or to cry for them. Since we took the cheapest class, which is called (quite rightfully) "hard seat", a hard seat kind of night is exactly what we got. Let's just say that the phrase "i got a chair's shape" gets a whole new meaning after such a night. They don't even bother to turn off the lights during the night, and instead they just keep selling MANA CHAMA throughout the night. The chinese people, by the way, really like MANA CHAMA and they eat it constantly, usually accompanied by several sorts of porks, especially the looks-like-a-space-food pork, which is a chunk of pork meat vaccumed into a silver wrap.

After this 22 hours ride we got back here, and the it felt great. It's good to come back to a place you already know. It's almost as getting back home (almost). We were thrilled to find out that the weather got much better than 2 months ago, and somebody even made the impossible and turned on the blue sky. It's much less humid now, and a little bit cooler, so we're really glad to come back and have a fine last taste of this city.

Yom Kippur

Going to see the old Jewish getto today, from the WWII period when some Jewish refugees seeked sanctuary in Shanghai from the Nazis. After that we'll pay a visit to Beit Chabad to the Kol Nidrey service, and just try to have the holiday spirit as much as we can in this on-going-party city. It's always a little bit hard to disconnect yourself from the outside world, especially on a day like this, when you try to focus on dwelling in peace and quite while China is celebrating it's 57 birthday (it's the chinese YOM HA'ATZMAUT today and during this upcoming week).

Gmar Hatima Tova!