China has been very eye-opening for us...it truly is a country of contradictions...you don't have to worry about finishing the food on your plate because there are "starving people in China"--but there is a lot of poverty here: especially in Tibet (see next "article").
China is an ancient country hell bent on modernizing...in a "stepford wives" kind of way...We have now travelled for almost a month--mostly in the North/West/Central parts of China--
Beijing (Tianamen Square, the Great Wall and the Forbidden City--we are avoiding the dead communists so we just hung outside Mao's current haunts)
Pingyao (an ancient walled city)
Luoyang (Longmen Caves and the Shaolin Temple--"ta gou!!!"--those monks are amazing!!!)
Xian (home of the Terracotta Warriors)
Chengdu (where we saw the baby pandas) then to TIBET!!!
We are now headed to the Yunnan province and working our way east to eat some dim sum.
Beijing was a shock--we were expecting a giant metropolis (Beijing is the size of Belgium) with all of the regular ills of a large city--homeless, garbage, begging, street people...strangely, Beijing wasn't as crowded as we thought it would be (China has distributed their population throughout the country--every city we have travelled to has populations of more than 4 million). The streets were clean--areas that were probably rough in their day are now covered by banners and getting cleaned up and ready for the big Olympic show (who knows where the people dislocated by this massive renovation are now)...there are no homeless people on the street...everything thing seems pretty ordered and clean--but China is chaotic and contradictory:
It is a rural country with mega-cities...there bustling cities filled with bucolic people...people seem busy but they aren't doing anything...there are sparkling clean attractions amidst piles of dirt...a general disregard of the enviroment but a recycling frenzy (I think there is a deposit system like in the US so the elderly are always after your plastic water bottles)...there is "controlled" westernization...communism overrun by consumers...hectic markets that don't sell anything...buddhist shrines adored by purported atheists...The Chinese are masters of a complex language, but novices of a simple one (English is going to be a big problem for China advancing further)...they are proper but spit everywhere and anywhere (we are talking about texas sized lugeys)...they are reserved but talk loudly...
But, the world better get prepared for China--it is opening its doors to the world and inviting themselves into every country...all the news on TV is about business in One China and developing "mutually beneficial" relationships with every country (from Benin to Venezuela, Finland to Vietnam) that supports the "One China" policy [forget about Taiwan and Tibet--they are China's now]. China is getting ready to play with the big boys. They will be successful if they can keep 1+billion people sedated and content (it might be time to invest in the yuan!!!)
