Rush hour

I had a "try to be a really good Chinese" day last Sunday. I went to see elementary / middle school ping pong tournament. I bough a kite. A big kite and a 250 meter line, with a shocking price tag of... 3 euros. I flew the kite. I had real home cooked chinese food. And I played Ma Jiang (or mahjong, in real english).

I did all that in a smallish town (well, in Finnish scale it was a huge metropol, with some 1,5 million citizens). So, do you think I blended well in? Nah, not really. I was honestly worried for the traffic safety, as the mopedists and scooter drivers bend over backwards to stare at me with my kite. They don't get to see a lot of waiguoren, I can presume, and they propably thought I was the girlfriend / wife of my Chinese colleague. Which they propably see even less.

It was a fun day! And getting the kite high, high up in the air was really satisfying. But! There were maybe twenty people flying their kites in a very, very small park.

With a modest exaggeration, I can say the air was full of kites. Really, there were so many of them, that you were in danger of getting the lines tangled all the time. I didn't think there would be a rush hour for kite flying, but live and learn!

Well, soon enough* I'll be in the Finnish "country-side" (i.e. our own yard) and surely enough there wont be a kite-congestion there :o)

* 25 days and counting...