China Recap

We're back! We've crossed the border into Mongolia and are out of the China Firewall (but the internet may be slower here than it was in India, so I apologize for not having more pictures).  We spent a couple very nice weeks in China, visiting some friends and trying to understand modern China.  The country seems to rebuild everything within a couple of years, so some of the history feels lost.

Here we are practicing posing like the Chinese do in photos

Shanghai is a completely modern city with skyscrapers, fancy restaurants and a very nice metro system.  We visited my friend Alice there, who recently moved to Shanghai with her husband. It was so fun seeing her and also having a guide who speaks Chinese! We walked around parts of the city, visited the Shanghai Museum, and ate at some great veg restaurants.

The skyline from the Bund

Shanghai Museum located in People's Park

The Chinese are known for their very impressive imitation meat

After a couple days in Shanghai we boarded one of the awesome high speed trains (up to 250km/hr or 150 mph) we arrived in Beijing.  We arrived on a day with horrible pollution so our first impressions were not great.  We also found it extremely difficult to get around the city.  The city changes so fast our guidebooks were of no use.

We accidentally bought first class tickets.  Felt like an airplane!

 We somehow found our way to the public bus that took us to the Great Wall, which was amazing.  The wall has been rebuilt over the years, so what we found impressive wasn't the actual wall, but the engineering feat it took to construct it given the landscape.

We visited the wall at Badaling

We also visited the Imperial City (also called the Forbidden City) which was largely closed up due to a recent theft.  It was nice seeing the buildings, but again, with so much of it having been rebuilt, there was little sense of history there. To get to the Imperial City you walk through Tienanmen Square, which is called the center of China.  It has so much security, undercover cops (who are quite conspicuous) and surveillance cameras.

The MAOsoleum (Jeff's joke) in Tienanmen Square

Imperial City with thousands of tourists

A cool bronze statue

Jeff and I enjoyed our time in China but we would have liked to see more of the natural beauty and less of the cities. China is not the easiest country to travel in both for language and for being vegetarian and it is definitely difficult to get an understanding of how old the country is with all the new construction (a building becomes an old building within 5 years of construction) but it was very interesting and we are glad we were there for a couple weeks.