Tag: China
Macau
Macau, our next-to-last stop, looked about as fresh, bright, and peppy as I felt when we arrived there. I had come down with a cold sometime in the middle of our last, and most eventful, overnight train ride. We...
Shanghai: Banquets
As I've mentioned before, the last couple weeks of our trip were markedly less energetic than the earlier parts had been. Our pace was pretty leisurely in Shanghai. We lingered over the exhibits of antique seals at the Shanghai...
Suzhou
The trip from Chengdu to Shanghai was our longest train ride yet, something like 36 hours long. We managed to trim a few hours off the trip by stopping in Suzhou and then taking a faster train (because, of...
Chengdu: Street Foods
While we were lazing about Chengdu's parks and teahouses, we were unfortunately missing out on a huge number of regional delicacies and street treats. One of the first things I did after we decided to go to Asia was...
Chengdu
By the time we arrived in Chengdu, we were exhausted. We'd been traveling for weeks, and the only real break we'd had was the time we spent on Ko Phi Phi in Thailand. (I know, poor us!) I felt...
Xi'an: More from the Muslim Quarter
Over the course of our time in Xi'an, we failed at most of the things we tried to do: getting off buses at the right stop, arriving at museums before closing time, buying pants, and biking around the city...
Xi'an: Dumpling Banquet
We did venture out of the Muslim Quarter (a few feet out of it anyways) for one meal in Xi'an: a dumpling feast from De Fa Chang. A very well-known and highly publicized institution, De Fa Chang had the...
Xi'an
It was a snappy twenty-hour train ride to Xi'an from Huhehaote, during which chilly, brown fields and pink blooming trees gave way to bright greenness and warmth. Xi'an was on our to-do list because of the famous Terracotta Army,...
Huhehaote (Hohhot)
I awoke on the morning of my 28th birthday in a business hotel in gray and rainy Inner Mongolia. This had not been the plan. The plan involved yurts, wide open grasslands, horses, fermented milk, and mutton, not 14...
Even More Beijing!
While Beijing seems to operate on a larger scale than the rest of the world, ultimately its giant spaces tie together small moments in the lives of hundreds of people. Take, for example, Beijing's lake district. Lined with bars,...
Beijing
Our return to China filled me with a remarkably strong and surprising joy. Certainly some of this emotion can be explained by the lifting of the economic tension of being in Japan, and some of it by the warm...
Guilin and Yangshuo
Greg and I have spent the last few days in Guilin and Yangshuo, in Guangxi Province, areas popular with Chinese tourists and backpackers alike for their impressive limestone karst peaks and views of the Li River. Both towns are...
Guangzhou
All of our guidebooks dismiss Guangzhou as a grey, bland city. It's true that it is not rich in the traditional sightseeing destinations: one of its biggest photo ops is a statue illustrating the legend of the city's creation,...
