Life in Changzhou

Free Time - Tempo Libero

(Changzhou and Surroundings - Changzhou e Dintorni)

It takes 10 minutes to realize that Changzhou's offer for one's free time is very limited... in fact, you can see everything there is to see in one week-end.

The challenge is to find interesting ways to spend your free time.

The most obvious option is buying a DVD player and catch up with the movies you missed in the last 20 years: you can buy DVDs for less than 1 euro and find almost everything:  blockbusters, independent movies, documentaries, TV series (the 9 series of Friends are a must for the lunch breaks), movies that haven't been released yet, B-movies with the same title as famous films, cult movies, world premieres. You name it: Italian, French, Japanese, Russian, Iranian, Turkmenistani movies: anything can make it to the DVD shops of Changzhou. If you're a cinema fan, you will easily become a collector, do weekly raids and end up searching for new ways of smuggling your new video collection to Europe, filling the cases of friends visiting (thank you, guys). The record is still detained by Michele (700!), but I still have 6 months and a cold winter to go....

Another option is trying to get closer to Chinese culture and commit yourself to learning the Chinese language (I failed miserably), practising martial arts (in our case: Taiji Quan) and learning to play Mah Jong (still a project). Devoting yourself to Chinese food is another option: eating out is the main social activity here- karaoke comes next. In the pics you can see Susi (the kid is her child Tian Tian) teaching us how to make jao-tze (the Chinese ravioli).

Finally you can explore the surroundings of Changzhou. The main attractions are Suzhou, Shanghai and Nanjing, but there are a lot of smaller towns and villages that can be interesting. The place I enjoyed most was Zhouzhuang, a lovely watertown 1 hour from Suzhou.

Click on a picture to enlarge it / Clicca sulle foto per ingrandirle

Zhouzhuang	DVD hunting	Tong Li	Tong Li	chez Susi
SARS	shopping in Shanghai	cycling around Changzhou	Dalin Temple	Tian Tian
Gambei	goodbye Andrea	goodbye Marco	Guo Qun	Taiji in the park
Taiji in the park	Sword Taiji	Taiji	dinner chez Guo Qun	June 2003
cycling to the Yangtze	the Yangtze River	Dinosaur Park	Dinosaur Park, Sept 03	Yangshuo, Oct 2003
Xmas03 at Mingdu	Goodbye Guiffre	February 2004	Feb 2004