Gifts for Family and Friends.

Get an iPod for music, videos, and photos.

Wish for a Sony Laptop .

A Gift for your special man..

Jewelery as Mum's surprise.

Did you enjoy the festivities over Christmas? I hope so, and that you welcomed in the New Year with a feeling of optimism that it would be mostly of happy events, to be enjoyed with your family and friends. Thank you all, in your different ways, for making my Christmas another one to remember. I did not see any snow except on Christmas cards and I suppose if anyone really wants to experience a white Christmas, they should book a trip to the north or south pole fairly quickly before, even there, the snow and ice disappears!

During a visit in November 2004, there was some snow at the Shaolin Temple, and to get to my day room, by walking up the snow covered track, shown on the right of the picture, was quite an experience, although I did have a burly looking Monk, to almost carry me there ! Perhaps snow is very pretty to look at if you don't have to go out! A friend in Shanghai sent me some of his computer graphics, one of which was a snow mountain scene. Some of the images he sends me are quite amazing, but I have not the faintest idea how he does them! Very annoying! ! !

I had a 'Chinese Christmas' for 2006; no turkey nor Christmas pudding, but a Chinese banquet of about 20 different dishes! A Chinese Christmas in St Helens with Chinese friends from St.Helens, Bromborough, Preston, Warrington, Wigan, and Liverpool ! Perhaps it was a fitting way to bring the year to a close, as it was only the second year, in about twenty years, that I had not made at least one visit to China. A month's visit had been planned for September, but then came the trouble at the airports, so the visit was cancelled. If the plane had blown up in mid-air I would have known nothing about it...... but to have to wait in the airport for 2, or 3, or 4, or 5 hours..... would have been torture !!!!!

Of course, I can be in China at any time of the day or night, just by thinking about it, with my eyes open or shut! From the first visit in 1987 there is Xian, where stall-holders selling models of the Terra Cotta Warriors would tap the clay models with a stick to produce a ringing sound to prove that they had been fired and were durable. Some models offered on the streets might just be sun-dried and painted. Buyers beware! Just outside the main site, one man, probably a farmer, was trying to sell just the two models he held in his hand, hoping to make a profit of a few pence I expect.

From 2004, there is the visit to see Grand Master Su Xi in his temporary accommodation, while new rooms were being built for him, at the Shaolin Temple. He was venerated by Buddhists world wide and died last year to be interred in the Pagoda that had already been completed at the nearby Pagoda Forest, to receive him; the Pagoda Forest is near The Shaolin Temple.

 A few months ago I put a new program on my laptop called Picasa which just searches the computer and displays a list of all the photographs it finds. It found photographs that I had forgotten I had taken even, so that means I now have an almost endless supply of China photos to remind me of my visits and to talk or write about, so be warned !!!!! The trouble is that in a few weeks time I shall be in China again, and then there will be more photos to add to the stockpile. Have you ever seen the one of me when I was about 10 years old ? ? ? ? ?

Also from 2004 is the haunting face of a 16 year old boy working on the Shaolin Temple building site. He left school at the age of 13 to earn money to help support his mother and siblings after his father died. Whenever I met him he would smile as if he was the happiest boy in the world, but when he was not aware of people looking at him, his face appeared to be full of despair, perhaps wondering what the future had in store for him. What have we in the UK got to complain about ?

There have been a number of places where my visits have created bedlam, particularly where children are concerned who have an unabashed inquisitiveness whenever a strange-looking foreign fellow comes into view. The home of one family we went to visit in Vietnam, living in a town near the China border, was opposite the entrance to a school. When the children started to return to school after their mid-day break, I started taking a few photos of them walking through the school gates. Suddenly I was spotted by one of them, who shouted something out, then there was a rush towards me by children who wanted to be included in the photo. There was a lot of noise and they went to school only after I had gone back into the house !

Then in 1992 [I think !] we went to visit a friend's family in Pailou, a countryside town well off the tourist routes, to which we travelled from HuaiHua by taxi with a woman driver. The taxi took us to the door and we all went inside where Mum made tea for us; Chinese tea of course! A few minutes later we had visitors; women carrying babies, men eating their lunch with chopsticks, children aged between 4 and 13. A boy in a yellow tee-shirt standing in the middle of the front row was eager to show me a shoulder bag he had been given, for when he started school. That was something he was looking forward to but when I met him again 3 years later he was looking forward to the day when he could leave !

Now it is time for me to leave! Not to China yet, but so that I can get these letters posted before another Christmas comes along. I suppose the shops are already working on plans to advertise Easter Eggs, then a month or so after, their windows will be decorated with holly!

I hope the year goes well for you….. keep looking forward to something special…. And I hope that at least one of your wishes will come true!