The End

We've come to our last day in China. This morning we visited a park where the locals come to sing, dance, and visit. Some of them do calligraphy using water brushes on the concrete.

Here is Steph in the rose garden.

Later we went to the market and Steph bought cherries.

Then we visited a Confucius temple.

We had a great time in China but are ready to come home. I'll put pictues and video on my web site www.asilo.com/china in the next couple of weeks.

Shanghai

We cruised into Shanghai this morning and left the boat after our 6 day journey down the Yangtze river. We went to the fantastic Shanghai Museum which is one of the best we've seen. I took many pictures, here are some samples:

I especially like the expression on the guy's face. Then we had a tea ceremony which was informative and tasty:

Later in the afternoon we checked into our lovely hotel perfectly situated on the Bund.

We also got the best meals of our visit so far.

Nanjing

Today we stopped in Nanjing, our last top before the end of the cruise in Shanghai. We visited the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Mausoleum, he was the founder of the Chinese republic. Normally you would expect a great view from a high spot like this but the haze reduced visibility.

It is in large beautiful park and it was nice to walk among trees.

Tomorrow is the end of our cruise. We dock outside Shanghai in the morning, tour the city, then check into the hotel. We're doing dim sum with a local guide, pictures tomorrow.

Yellow Mountain

Today we took a bus ride for 2 1/2 hours from the boat to the Yellow Mountain. This area is the inspiration for many famous Chinese paintings. The area is beautiful but hard to capture in pictures.

This is a classic Yellow Mountain painting.

There were a lot of steps going up and down on the mountain and they offered to carry people (for a price).

Massive Population Changes in China

I haven't seen this reported in the Western press, but China is going through an unprecedented massive population shift. When I looked for it today I found this NY Times article from a year ago.

We have seen amazing building booms in every city - hundreds of huge apartment buildings being built one after another. I heard a lecture on the boat the other day that explained why - China has decided to relocate 250M farm peasants from the countryside to cities over the next 12 years. The problem that Chinese authorities is trying to solve is that the family farmers have tiny farms which are not enough to lift them out of poverty because there is no economy of scale like mechanization of farming, something that has happened naturally in the US over the past century. The Chinese need to aggregate these small family farms into large factory farms and move the rural families to the cities where they (hopefully) will move into the consumer middle class.

Since everything is centrally planned in China, this can't happen organically over the years like it did in the US, it must be centrally mandated and planned. Of course there are many problems, like corrupt local governments that steal the money that the peasants were supposed to get for their farms leaving them with no money to buy the apartment in the city that the are being forced to move to.

Anyone who thinks that China is going to soon rule the world doesn't understand the tremendous internal problems (like horrible pollution) that China will be dealing with.

Food Frustration in China

One of the downsides of traveling with a large group (over a hundred people in this group) is that food becomes a difficult logistic matter. They can't take massive numbers of people to small local restaurants so we end up being taken to buffet restaurants in hotels. Except for one occasion, we have not eaten an authentic Chinese meal. When we were in Xi'an for lunch we took a taxi to a dumpling restaurant described in my Chinese guide book which seemed authentic. Other than that our meals have been mediocre.

We are determined to change that when we get to Shanghai on Friday. It means going off without the tour group, and we've seen that the authentic local restaurants are too daunting for us to handle on our own where no one speaks English, so we have arranged for a local tour guide to take us out for meals while we are there.

I'll take pictures and provide descriptions when we get some authentic Chinese restaurant experience.

Wuhan

The boat stopped in Wuhan today, mostly because it was the city we reached by mid day on our way down the river. Amy and decided we were more interested in walking around the city while Steph & Andree went on the boat tour of a local museum and other sites.

As we walked along we saw this bar but it was too early to stop and have a drink:

We saw this couple having their pictures taken:

We stopped and had a drink at the Hot & Crazy Sugar Daddy.

We walked through areas that were definitely not western tourist areas but still there was a lot of English on signs. I've read that Chinese authorities are disturbed about the leakage of English terms into common use (like "Wifi") and are working to define Chinese equivalents. I remember that France had a similar fit about English leakage some years ago.