In mid-September, Koreans celebrate Chuseok, a traditional holiday where people travel back to the towns where they are from in order to visit their families, celebrate the harvest, and pay their respects to their ancestors, living and dead.  Unable to be Carolina-bound just yet, Ric and I opted to use the five days of vacation to visit China. While I will happily wander about anywhere, I have to admit China really wasn’t on my list of places to see.  Boy, was I wrong.  It’s cool beyond belief, and we’re already contemplating going back to catch some things we didn’t get to see the first time around.

In the interest of avoiding the creation of an overly long and boring post, I’m just going to give you a brief overview of what was an amazing experience.  I will say that the private tour we booked through The China Guide was super-affordable and allowed us to build a custom itinerary and travel with a private guide and car service.  Our hotels, admissions fees, transportation within the country, and some meals were also included.  If we do go back to China, we would definitely work with them again.

A couple notes on China in general: it is a foreign country, and it’s definitely not Western.  But the areas we were in were definitely easier to navigate than we expected.  We felt as comfortable in Beijing as we would have in a large American city. Like any metropolis fraught with tourists, we were warned to watch our wallets and beware of unscrupulous street vendors.  However, we encountered no problems.  

The traffic is legendary and its intensity reaches mythic proportions, even for someone who has lived in an Asian city of four million and has traveled in Korea and Japan.  Crosswalks are almost nonexistent, and no one really pays attention to them anyway.  You kind of just dart across the road when you get an opportunity.  This definitely made us grateful for the comfort and safety of having a private car.  

In terms of practical considerations, you can’t drink the tap water in China, but bottled water is cheap and readily available, as is all manner of Coke products.  A soda ran about 3 or 4 RMB in China, the American equivalent of 50 to 65 cents.  Bottled water was even cheaper.  In fact, most of China is still pretty dirt cheap.  Case in point:  we ate a phenomenal  four course meal for about $20 American in Xi’an in a restaurant that gave us our own private dining room and a team of about four servers to cater to our every need.  

Now, on to the cool things we saw.  These are just a tiny selection of pictures culled from the over 1200 we took during our five days there.  

 

This is the Forbidden City, the ancient home of Chinese emperors.  The photo is only one small shot of an enormous complex of palaces, office buildings, pavilions, courtyards, and other structures created solely for the use of the royal family.

This is another part of the Forbidden City.  The white marble walkway Ric and I are standing on was originally used only by the emperor.  

I spotted this little guy growing in a water garden at Jingshan Park. From the pagoda at the top of the park, you can see a gorgeous view of the entire Forbidden City and neighboring areas of Beijing. Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t really cooperating the day we were there.  

Nothing can really encompass the scope and grandeur of the Great Wall of China.  In two words: mind blown.

According to our tour guide, the Mongolian border was just over that mountain in the distance. 

 

We also visited the Temple of Heaven, a series of temple buildings reserved for the imperial family’s use.  Here, emperors participated in seasonal prayers for the harvest, for peace, and for longevity.  The architecture there was amazing!  All the marble and the woodwork were gorgeous!

These photos are from the Summer Palace, the vacation home of the imperial family.  It was gorgeous and green.  Incidentally, that corridor we’re sitting in is the longest one in the world.

In addition to sightseeing in Beijing, we rode twelve hours by sleeper train to Xi’an in order to see the terracotta warriors. The train, while an efficient and cost-effective means of transportation, was thoroughly unremarkable.  The Beijing train station was a zoo.  Xi’an was worth every minute it took to get there and then some.   Details from that leg of our journey will be in my next post.  

 

 

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: China, Korea, places to see, Things to Do, Travel