Sleeping at the beach
Since I came to Wuxi I am quite exhausted by working everyday as intern at Bosch Diesel. The internship is averagely interesting, not too many special things to learn, since I am mostly programming. The two weekends before the last one I spent with my family to show them Shanghai and bring them back to Shanghai airport, respectively.
Last weekend was different, however. With four other interns from Bosch (and Bosch/Siemens), I travelled to Putuo Shan (普陀山), which is a nice little island south of Shanghai. We took the ship from Shanghai (<1 hour away from Wuxi by train) to the island over night, which took us about 12 hours plus 2 hours after we noticed, we were on the wrong island first, fortunately we noticed it soon enough to get on the ship again 
On the island, it was not any cooler than in Shanghai or Wuxi, which is 35+°C, and the sun was not shining less. The difference was just that there was not much shadow, which meant a nice red sunburn for some of us, especially me 
So we spent the Saturday with sight-seeing on the island, wandering at the beach and look out for some good place to spend the night. Beside of very nice natural and scenic spots and the afore-mentioned beaches, the island offers MANY temples, big Buddha statues and a wonderful view on the seaside. When we finally found a place to sleep, we also tested the sea, which is the East-Chinese Ocean, which in fact is not divided from the Pacific Ocean (note for me: swimming in the Pacific Ocean: checked).
When the sun went down, we discussed whether the black little dog that watched us at the beach, has rabies (”Tollwut” in German, a sickness that makes creatures aggressive and die eventually) and whether it would come and attack us in the night. We voted the issue and determined that the dog would not have rabies and attack us, because there is no rabies on a small island like this (I don’t remember who invented this argumentation, maybe it was Mr. Beer ). So we made a small fire, talked about many different things and solved some riddles of the kind where one explains a strange situation and the others have to guess how the situation evolved, until we decided to quit this because the solutions are always too strange (people always commit suicide because of strange reasons). Thomas (the tall one) and me also explored the hills around our camping place in the dark and found out that there was a Chinese party to which we were definetely not invited on the other side of the hills.
On Sunday, we were a bit tired, because all of us five people slept on Moe’s air mattress, the only one we had. Thomas went to go swimming in the morning and asked us to com, too, while he complained about the small animals biting him in the water. Afterward, Thomas and me explored the same hills as in the night, this time in daylight, and the rest of the island, including some caves and some earth holes that just carry the name “cave” and some more.. um.. temples (there are too many and they are all similar).
Eventually we took the speed boat to Ning Bo (宁波), the next bigger city and had our meal at McDonald’s, because some of us (don’t want to mention names) had enough from Chinese food after having a complete Chinese lunch on Saturday From there, we took the train to Shanghai, where we arrived around Sunday late evening/midnight.
All in all, it was a very nice weekend and a welcome alternation to common every-day-working-life!
