China Travels

As mentioned, I had the pleasure of flying on the largest and greatest commercial airplane in existence, and I can confirm that it was a pleasure.  The plane was shockingly quiet, and Emirates does it right on service.  I mean, even in coach, there are wood accents around the windows and marble counter tops in the bathrooms (not that either of those mattered at all, but it was noted and appreciated).  Plus, each seat has a pretty big TV with over 1,000 movies/tv shows on demand (and you can watch through takeoff and landing), music, and 4 live cameras from the front/back/bottom/top of the plane.  Plus, the staircase between decks is bigger than those in most houses, which I found cool, for some reason.

The plane dispensed me in Hong Kong, and while I was sad to leave Emirates, I quickly warmed to the former British colony (protectorate? conquered land?).  English is everywhere; it pretty much felt like New York.  It was nice to feel understood, and I tip my hat to England for conquering the delightful little island and imparting the wonderful English language on the inhabitants.

Late the next afternoon, we took a train into the Chinese mainland, spent an hour negotiating customs, ate an early dinner at the train station, and then boarded an overnight train to Yangshuo.  One fun tidbit I've learned about myself from this round of traveling (first observed in India) is that I can't sleep on trains even when in a pretty soft bed with clean bedding.  Every time the train slows down or stops, my body wonders what is happening and wakes me up.  It's pretty fun.

We got to Yangshuo at 10am the next morning, ate some breakfast, and headed out on a boat tour of the Li River.  Around Yangshuo and the Li River are these odd, sheer limestone hills jutting out of the earth everywhere (they're memorialized in all the Chinese paintings you've seen, and they're on the 20 Yuan note).  I'd upload a picture or two, but China doesn't seem to like that, so check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangshuo_County.

We spent a couple of nights in Yangshuo, and I really enjoyed it.  The town is only maybe 50,000 people, and the culture is really relaxed.  It's a cafe city with restaurants and tea/coffee houses spilling out into the streets everywhere.  All the coffee was good, and the food is great.  I think I'm beginning to reverse the India/Nepal weight losses, which is positive.

From Yangshuo, we flew China Southern (surprisingly nice airline) to Chengdu, where I've seen some giant pandas and red pandas, hung out at Wenshu Temple, jogged, walked around Culture Square (has the largest Mao statue in China) and People's Park, eaten some Sichuan hot-pot (painfully, painfully spicy), and found out I got into the Rice MBA program.  I really like Chengdu; it's about half the size of Shanghai, so merely 12 million people, but it's also a pretty relaxed city with lots of tea houses and spots to relax and play majong.

Apologies for the long and rambling post, but China seems to be randomly deciding whether or not to block this blog from their servers.  We're good today, so I'm trying to get as up to date as possible (mainly so I don't forget things).  Other than random site-blocking, China is really great.  It's very, very modern and clean and everyone is very friendly, trying their best to speak English (most people think they know it better than they actually do).

On one hand, it's awesome to be seeing this vibrant, growing country, and on the other hand, I can't help but thinking they are WAY ahead of what I expected, meaning they are WAY closer to taking over the world than I had anticipated.  Their roads are perfect and buildings are nice and people are hard working and power never goes off and 12mm people drive without traffic jams and subways run on time to the second.  Everything seems too good to be true.  Perhaps I'm just in the tourist twilight zone, and everyone is an actor, and all the building are mirages.  Perhaps.