Next Country - China!

China has always fascinated me. It’s an ancient civilization that has undergone countless changes. The land is beautiful and ecologically diverse. The food is delicious. And yet, it felt like a hard place to visit. I was also apprehensive about whether it would be easy, or safe, to get around. 

So for the first time to China we hired a travel agency to plan our trip. They took care of every detail from booking all our hotels and inter-country travel, which was extensive (9 private vans, two trains, three flights and a boat ride). They also helped us navigate the complicated visa process. There was a guide and driver to meet us and walk us through every step from each airport to hotel check-in to even ordering at restaurants for us. The tour group basically held our hand (for better or worse) the entire time. Now that the trip is over, I can say that for our first trip to China, we made the right choice. 

Some initial impressions:

- China is a LOT more developed than I had realized. 

- The roads are amazing, the train system is truly impressive and the streets are immaculate. 

- The Chinese seem to like very cute things. From pastel colored scooters, to cartoony food, and exaggerated stick figures on caution signs, it was all quite cute. 

- Many of the lines of beauty that I had attributed to Japan were actually from China or at least shared with China.

- I never saw any homeless people or any obvious poverty at all. 

- All of the people I encountered seemed content and prosperous, not exactly wealthy, but certainly upper middle class. 

Other thoughts:

- There are cameras and facial recognition everywhere. This really shouldn’t have been a shock, but the reality of it was a bit unnerving. Even in the back of every passenger van used by our tour guides, there would be four (!) cameras pointed at us! I’ve never had my face and passport scanned so much. I joked that by the end of the trip immigration would give me a highlights reel of all the places I’ve been.

- So much security. There was airplane level bag-scanning and full pat-downs for nearly every site we visited. 

- We were restricted in our internet usage. The internet was everywhere, but blocked google, Gmail, WhatsApp, and Facebook. We could use a VPN to get to those, but not through any wi-Fi available. So we had to use our sim data for that. We think the only reason that worked was because it was an international sim we had set up before we left the US. 

- WeChat is the main way people communicate and pay for things in China, however we could not access it ourselves since we are not Chinese, have a Chinese bank, or Chinese-issued credit card, and for some unexplained reason WeChat didn’t like our iPhones. 

- China (in the places we visited) was an almost entirely cashless society. The few times we used cash, people had to go digging for change. Most Chinese used WeChat, which we could not access, to pay for things. Luckily, we could access the alternative payment method, Alipay. 

- The Chinese people really do not understand homeschooling. It was the number one question that was asked by every tour guide, driver, hotel worker, or any Chinese tourist we struck up a conversation with. It was always “how did you get permission from the teacher to travel this long?” After the tenth time of being asked this, I finally found a quick way to explain it, that didn’t result in blank looks. 

I said, “I had the qualifications to teach my children, and I registered with the government that I was doing so for the current school year, and then as the end of the year the kids would take a test to prove their academic progress.” Only then did I get nods of understanding, followed by some variation of the Chinese proverb, “Hearing about a place a thousand times is not as good as seeing it once.” If they were parents, they then lamented the extreme pressure their own kids have in the classroom. 

- People thought we were extremely wealthy simply because we had three kids. “How can we afford to have three children?” When I told them I had friends who had 5, 6, and even 7 kids, they truly didn’t believe me. 

- While the food was amazing, hotel breakfasts were challenging unless you wanted a full Chinese dinner first thing in the morning. Bread is oddly sweet and real coffee was almost non-existent before 10 am. 

- I felt completely safe at all times. Watched, but safe. 

The rest of this section on China will follow our city by city travels. Coming up, the Yunnan Province!