Two out of three

Olympic knitting has continued around here for the past few days. I had set myself the target of knitting 2 hats plus a pair of wrist warmers during the Beijing games. It was quite an ambitious target given that I went back to work.

I almost did it. I've already shared my finished wrist warmers. Yesterday I managed to finish the first hat but late last night, I conceded defeat on the second one.

This is the finished hat. The pattern is Gretel by Ysolda Teague and its knitted in Kid classic by Rowan. I love both the yarn and the pattern.



I'm only about half way through the other one but hopefully I should get it finished by the end of the week.

I had originally planned to have finished posting China pictures by the end of the Olympics but I appear to have run out of Olympics before I ran out of pictures so I'm going to post the remaining ones over the next week or so.

First up more street scenes from Xi'an. The balloons are for some sort of special event in a department store.



And next a classic Chinese mass bicycling picture from Xi'an.



After visiting Xi'an, we went on to visit Tai'an in Shandong province and went up Mount Taishan. Some of the tour group climbed these steps to get up the mount. Given that it was 35 degrees celsius that day, some of us (including me) took a cable car. Everything that is used or consumed at the top is carried up the steps by porters.



This is a picture of the tour group. The two blokes were the guides and the rest of us are a multi national group - two Australians, two English women, a Singapore Chinese woman and me from Scotland. This picture shows how steep the stairs are.



I had a slight moment on top of this mountain. Very occasionally I get vertigo with heights and I had a full blown panic attack on this weird path where the path dropped down suddenly. Thankfully I recovered quickly as the scenery was amazing.