Korean Mud festival

Summertime is festivaltime! Towers of beer, cool rockbands and thunderstorms transforming the plains in huge mudbaths. Well remove the cool rockbands and imagine a whole lot of mud, mud slides, muds swimming pools, mud wrestling, ... and you will get one of the most popular festivals in Korea: The Boryeong Mud festival!

It is an amazing international festival organised in summer, 16 to 24 July for 2011, which finds its origin in promoting cosmetic products. Who said you had to suffer to be beautiful?

My modeling Career

Generally people think that when working in tourism you get a lot of advantages like free hotel rooms and flight tickets.  Actually these benefits are almost non-existing, although you might get some reductions on hotel rooms. But the great thing in tourism is that you get to meet a bunch of people from all over the world.

Chinese people, especially those who haven't seen a lot of foreigners, are very curious about our different lifestyle. Mouth-dropped starring is quite common, especially if you would be tall and blond.

This Chinese curiousness can be very annoying, as when you get stalked to see where you're heading. Or as people check the groceries you bought in your supermarket trolley.
On other occasions it can be very charming in interesting. Being a foreigner in China can bring you to stardom in this Communist country.

So far I have acted on local TV and did two commercials.
A few years back I got a teacher's job in Hong'An county, Hubei province. For the annual Christmas show in the local TV studio I was one of the three TV hosts. This was broad casted in Hong'An TV.

One day I needed some call credit for my Chinese telephone. At that time I was guiding in Chengdu, Hebei province. I couldn't get any prepaid card at several kiosks. So I decided to go to the local China telecom shop. Upon entering the shop on man was acting very exited. After I got my credit he tried to explain me they had a promotion period for a new phone and he wanted my help for this promotion. I had to hold the phone and smile while he was taking some pictures. I guess he made some posters out of it, foreign models are very sought after in China, so he immediately saw an opportunity.

I played model one more time, advertising a new hotel. For my guiding job I was inspecting some hotels in Shanghai. After visiting some fancy places the Millenium Hongqiao hotel was next. This hotel held its "soft" opening, which means the hotel receives guests and tries to invite travel agencies for inspection, but is not 100 % operational yet. I was very well received and got the whole tour, including spa, swimming pool, all type of rooms and restaurants.  In the lovely restaurant one of the assistant managers and I were having lunch, when suddenly she got a phone call. She ended the call and asked me if I had time to come back in the evening. That day the Millenium hotel held the photo shoot for its website and catalogue, but their international model had just cancelled. The high-payed British photographer could not be cancelled and I was asked if I could help out. Of course, no problem. So I got back in the evening. I dressed up in a neat seat and got my instructions. I had to stand at the front desk, pretending to check in and keep looking in the eyes of the girls at the desk. Standing there half an hour, gibbering with those girls, wasn't an easy task.
The Millenium Hongqiao hotel used following picture for nearly 2 years on there website, but nowadays new pictures have replaced my glorious picture. So my modeling career is silently getting to an end.

Maybe I will encounter some new opportunities in China!

Sunrise-Sunset

Kopi Luwak - expensive coffee

Kopi Luwak is the most expensive coffee in the world. The Kopi Luwak is mainly produced in the Indonesian archipelago. A cup of Kopi Luwak can be sold for around $50 around the world.
A special animal called the Asian Palm Civet is needed to obtain this pricey coffee. This is animal gives the strange name to this coffee. Kopi is the Indonesia name for coffee and Luwak is the local name of the Asian Palm Civet.

So what is so special about this coffee? First of all the process to collect the beans is quite extraordinary.
The coffee beans, which are cultivated on fields, get eaten by the Luwak. The fruit pulp gets digested by the Luwak, but the seeds pass by the stomach and are defecated. Inside the Luwak's stomach and intestine the seeds get some time to ferment and give the special taste to the coffee. The dung of this animal is collected. The seeds are washed and sun dried. After this process the seeds are slightly roasted as to keep their special taste.

So how does it taste? A bit difficult to describe. As i tried this coffee, I felt it didn't taste bitter as most coffees do. It had a mild and even fruity taste.
But damn it's expensive for a cup!

Faces of Rajasthan

In the future some more reports of India will follow. To celebrate this, a first post about portraits of Rajasthan people:

Invisible man from China

Liu Bolin is a Chinese Photographer-artist. He specialised himself in the art of invisibility and is now famous for his special art form. He will study a place and then paint himself so as to melt away in the picture. Every pictures takes him more than 10 hours of work.
Some of his works have a political undertone and in 2005 the Chinese government closed down his art studio. This didn't stop him and he now has a International reputation.

He work is sometimes compared to the children books "Where's Waldo?"

Snow festival

The Yearly Sapporo Snow festival is back!
This year from 7 February to 13 February the most important matsuri (festival) of Hokkaido will take place.
About 2 million visitors will gather to Sapporo to participate in the 62st edition of the festival.
Snow was brought from 600 trucks and 250 different images and structures are made.