Cheese!!!

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but cheese is not that easy to come by here in Pingxiang. You can get slices of 'plastic' cheese in the supermarkets, but as far as I'm concerned, that's only acceptable for consumption in dire emergencies!! I understand that you can get pizza (or some Chinese version of pizza) in the Western-style bars / coffee shops here, but I haven't tried it yet.

So I miss cheese. Obviously, I can live without it, and mostly I have to, but it's a real treat when I get to have some.

We've just been to Changsha, the nearest big city, for a couple of days. This means that I got to go to Pizza Hut and MacDonalds - yippee! Sadly they don't have Starbucks there yet (not that I'm a big fan of Starbucks, but it's nice to go to a proper Western coffee place and have a big mug of nice coffee...) Pizza Hut is also not my favourite place for pizza, but I'm not going to start being choosy about this!

We also went shopping in the French supermarket, Carrefour. Last time we went they had a very disappointing selection of cheese, but this time they had Brie, Emmental and 'sharp' Cheddar. I had to buy some. You don't get much for your money, but I'm going to enjoy it sooooooooo much. I also got some 'normal' bread, that is bread that is not sweet (most Chinese bread is).

We also managed to find our way to the place where they dug up a 2100 year old Chinese woman. We'd already seen her well-preserved body in the Provincial Museum in Changsha on our last visit and this time we managed to find our way to the burial mound. This used to be outside the city when it was excavated in the early 70s, but is now just a suburb and surrounded by shops and houses. We had the position of the tombs marked on our map, but in reality it was really quite difficult to find - no signs or any indication in fact that they were there. They're in what are now the grounds of a hospital, which carries the same name as the tombs, but this was the only clue... Anyway, it was great to see the place where they were discovered and then to return to the museum afterwards to have another look at the coffins and the body.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mawangdui

In Changsha we stayed in a hotel called 'Motel 168' (http://www.motel168.com/En/). It's a chain of hotels, which I'd read about on someone else's blog. The price was not the cheapest, but seemed reasonable. We figured the standard should be consistent as well as it was a chain. It turned out to be pretty good really. The room could've done with re-decorating, but on the whole it was a lot cleaner that a lot of hotels we've stayed in, despite having a carpet (these are generally very dirty and badly looked-after).

One final thing, as it's been Chinese New Year, lots of people have been travelling all round the country, going home, or to other cities to visit family and friends. It truly is a massive operation. Even though it's really all over now, the bus and train stations are still busy. Travelling to Changsha and back, we were aware of the soldiers at the station, basically on riot control. This might seem a bit mad, but when you see the way people push and shove, it's definitely necessary. There were also a lot of police officers on duty at Changsha train station, making sure everyone was queueing at the ticket windows in single file (I got told off for not adhering to this!) and I even saw one policeman telling a man to put out his cigarette! Amazing. I've never seen that before...

As a PS, I've just been shopping in Pingxiang and found a bakery that was selling French sticks. They don' t have a crusty outside like true French baguettes, but the taste is good. Yippee!!