Cathy's Place: May Day in China and tour commentary

View from Half Moon Mountain

May 1 is International Labor Day, a national holiday in China. We have been having a great time but I cannot get my pics from my phone over to my iPad to upload to my blog. We are in Yangshuo today which is a little county town in the mountains in the south of China. There are rice paddies and water buffalo and tall limestone mountains just like you see in Chinese brush paintings. In the northern part of the country, they produce wheat so we ate lots of noodles.

The Great Wall of China was awe inspiring. I never thought I would ever see it. Same with the Terracotta Soldiers near Xi'an. I remembered when they were discovered in the early 1970's. We met the farmer who found them when he was digging for a well. I will have more pictures to upload when I return hone.

Being in China was an amazing experience but there was an awful lot of traveling between places by air. So a lot of waiting around time and issues with my ears that are too small to handle the pressure differences. Also, we had to pass a lot of open markets where they tried to sell you all manner of junk. You had to bargain with them and it's confusing to do that when you are constantly calculating the difference of dollars and yuans (RMD). I bought a few gifts for folks back home but it wasn't easy. Most of the ladies we were traveling with spent huge amounts of time (and money) buying things including new suitcases to take their purchases home. The tour had several places where we went for education but they really just wanted to sell us something like the silk factory or the tea ceremony. I found this annoying. The food for lunch and dinner was all basically the same thing. We sat at big round tables with a big lazy Susan where they would place the dishes. Napkins and water were hard to come by. All the dishes were steeped in oil and MSG. The eggplant dishes were the most tasty. We would leave huge amounts of rice and soup hardly eaten. The soup was mostly tasteless and there were tastier noodle dishes so the rice wasn't much eaten. I don't care to have anymore Chinese food anytime soon.

A few nights we would gather in the evening to do some brush painting which was fun.

There has been so much change in China since Mao's death that it is hardly recognized as China. It's certainly better for the Chinese people. To get married in China today a man needs the five C's: cash, car, career, condo, and ? (I'll think of it later)

The other thing I didn't like about the tour was the extra money spent on tips for guides, local guides, bus drivers, and options. For example, the tour included the tickets to the Great Wall but if you wanted to see it you had to pay to take a gondola to the top. Also, the Tang Dynasty Banquet would have cost a lot, but we didn't do it- so we didn't see any ancient Chinese culture (dancing, singing, etc). Also there was a whole half day in Yangsuo where there was nothing to do unless you paid extra for a 2 hour farm tour. We decided not to do it and just rested in the hotel all afternoon. We did pay for the optional boat ride at night on the Huangpu River in Shanghai to see all the illuminated buildings, but we couldn't get into the less crowded observation deck without paying more money (which we did not do). I did have two nice foot massages. I am sure that Deborah and Jeff's trip biking around China 18-20 years ago was a lot more fun.