places i visited in china
here are the places i visited in china and their respective significances. and for the added touch of coherency, the list is in chronological order!
-- shanghai (first and last stop): good for shopping, seeing foreigners, skyscrapers, and starbucks
-- shandong province: taishan, one of china's five famous mountains; qufu, where confucius' temple (modelled like forbidden city), house (or should i say estate), and family cemetery (dug up during the cultural revolution) are located; jinan, capital of shandong and dubbed the spring city, where there is a famous lake and a really cool bubbling spring
-- xian: ancient capital of many dynasties; site of terra-cotta warriors, many emperors' tombs (including the a-team infamous qin shihuang di), and a grandiose fight between my parents (more about it later)
* * *due to a coughstupidcough decision on my dad's part to change his laptop's operation system without telling the rest of us, we lost almost all of the pictures taken at the above locations, since they had been stored in the laptop* * *
-- wenzhou, zhejiang province: return to the humid, developed southern coastal cities; the medical school my parents went to, with a brand new campus as well as some vestiges of what it used to look like in the late 70s/early 80s
-- linhai, zhejiang: mom's hometown, much development since our last visit in 2000
-- ningbo, zhejiang: dad's hometown, also chiang kai-shek's hometown; nice, developed city; the small suburb* of xiaogang, which is dad's real hometown, is still some 10 to 20 years behind
*suburbs in china tend to be a lot more squalid/poor/behind than the cities; the rich are all moving to the large metropolises
-- shanghai (first and last stop): good for shopping, seeing foreigners, skyscrapers, and starbucks
-- shandong province: taishan, one of china's five famous mountains; qufu, where confucius' temple (modelled like forbidden city), house (or should i say estate), and family cemetery (dug up during the cultural revolution) are located; jinan, capital of shandong and dubbed the spring city, where there is a famous lake and a really cool bubbling spring
-- xian: ancient capital of many dynasties; site of terra-cotta warriors, many emperors' tombs (including the a-team infamous qin shihuang di), and a grandiose fight between my parents (more about it later)
* * *due to a coughstupidcough decision on my dad's part to change his laptop's operation system without telling the rest of us, we lost almost all of the pictures taken at the above locations, since they had been stored in the laptop* * *
-- wenzhou, zhejiang province: return to the humid, developed southern coastal cities; the medical school my parents went to, with a brand new campus as well as some vestiges of what it used to look like in the late 70s/early 80s
-- linhai, zhejiang: mom's hometown, much development since our last visit in 2000
-- ningbo, zhejiang: dad's hometown, also chiang kai-shek's hometown; nice, developed city; the small suburb* of xiaogang, which is dad's real hometown, is still some 10 to 20 years behind
*suburbs in china tend to be a lot more squalid/poor/behind than the cities; the rich are all moving to the large metropolises