Dad asked me, a while back, to actually write something about how I felt about going to China. Not just the things we saw, the history that was there, or what it was we did, but how it made me feel ( Read more... )

Here's the whole of the trip to China in 2013, from preparations to getting home and some of the aftermath as well. I'm getting the individual entries off my sticky post, so thought they'd do well in a bunch here.

1. Preparations
2. Travel and First Day in Beijing - Hutong and Lama Temple
3. Beijing - Forbidden City and Summer Palace
4. Beijing - Ming Tombs, the ( Read more... )

Our very last day in China was in Shanghai. The hotel was in this middling area where it was within very close driving distance to the shopping districts, but there wasn't all that much that was withing walking distance ( Read more... )

Suzhou is just West of and a little north of Shanghai, and it's on the Grand Canal, an enormous canal that was built all the way from Beijing, and was used by an emperor or another to do the Grand Inspection, a euphemism for Tax Collection. It's beautiful, though thinking about the fact that it was all dug by hand with what was essentially slave ( Read more... )

I woke up unable to speak because of my throat. I was tired, but felt mostly lucid. I was also absolutely determined to be able to go on the extra trip on the first, the next day, as we'd paid extra for it, and I really wanted to see the Garden out in Suzhou ( Read more... )

Guilin was the smallest of the cities we were visiting, with "only" 700,000 people, and according to Lily and Jevons, it's pretty much a village out in the middle of no where, in comparison. It's quite close to Vietnam, and the sultry weather matches. The city has very distinct limits on the buildings, making sure that there were no high rises to ( Read more... )

The next morning dawned wet and drizzly, and we had to go through the routine of packing up all our suitcases early enough for the bellboys to get it all and pack it up to go to the airport. Our flight to Guilin was an evening flight, and we had the Wild Goose Pagoda and a visit to a jade store and climbing the Xi'an City Wall all scheduled for the ( Read more... )

The breakfast buffet in Xi'an was so long and so spread out that we took an extra fifteen minutes for breakfast. *laughs* I had a pumpkin congee, fresh longan fruit still in their shells (and peeled and bitten they looked just like the dragon's eye they were named for), an almond croissants, and one of the fruit yogurt cups that were designed for ( Read more... )

We got up, had our amazing buffet breakfast, and headed to the publishers next door the minute the porters had taken all our bags.

It turned out to be a place called The Commercial Press which has been around since 1897 and focuses mostly on textbooks, references, and educational materials. Dad had a friend who always frequents the Shanghai branch ( Read more... )

Okay, I found this cool quick reference for all the Chinese Dynasties on Wikipedia. The best is that there's a graphical representation near the bottom of the page as well as the table at the top. Most people don't actually start listing these until the Qin Dynasty (the sixth one down) because they don't actually consider all of China united until ( Read more... )