新年快乐 (xīnniánkuàilè) Happy New Year!
2015 has been a great year and one full of adventure and new experiences! Here's to hoping that 2016 will be the same or even better! (I also need to start checking off more countries on my list of places to visit, but where to go first?)
However a bit closer to my home away from home, I visited Luodai 洛带 (about 20km outside of Chengdu). Luodai is a thousand year old Hakka (one of the 52 minorities in China) ancient town and has lots of amazing and incredibly spicy food!
My tolerance for spicy food amazes me and I was even able to stand more of the spiciness than my Chinese friend! 加油! (Come on)! Plus the little fried quail eggs on a skewer were amazing! (Covered in Sichuan spices too, just to give it that extra kick to warm you up in winter).
As you can see it was a pretty hectic day (it was a national holiday weekend after all) and despite towering over the majority of the Chinese population with my height, the locals still pushed me around! (There's no such thing as queuing here in China, and as a British guy I often like to complain about the lack of queuing etiquette here)! I can't wait to get out of China for a little while during the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) and get away from these crowds!
I'll leave you with this picture of one of the Hakka locals who live and work in Luodai. Here he's making a peanut/caramel biscuit snack which was pretty tasty! (Ashamedly, I don't have any pictures of the biscuits as me and my friend ate them all on the way back to Chengdu that evening)!