China - summary

China is such an amazing country – we really only touched the surface and found so much to enjoy! It was certainly an adventure - we were often in towns and cities where we were the only Westerners, not a blonde hair in sight, and although at times it could be difficult we did pretty well on the whole. Everyone here wants to say “hello” to you so that you turn round, but most of them are quite shy and wouldn't sit next to you on a bus unless there was no choice. It is funny hearing little “hello”s wherever you go. Those who do speak a bit of English are extremely friendly and happy to help and really curious about where you come from, what you are doing in China – it's also a good chance for them to practice their Engish a little. During our time in China we met some really genuinely friendly people who really wanted to talk to us. Al had lots of women staring at him and lots of people – both men and women telling him how beautiful his eyes are – though on one occasion his 'strange' looks shocked a little toddler so much that he looked at Al and burst into tears.

There were a few not so great things of course – dog obviously, skinned, boiled, honey-glazed always made me sick to the stomach, and the spitting and nose emptying on the street is something that you just can't get used to, although you get that all over Asia.

Eating in China was quite difficult. We had made the decision to be vegetarian while we were here, but that went out the window pretty quickly – it's impossible to avoid meat here, it's sneaked into everything – dumplings, spring rolls, and the stock that vegetables are cooked in. We just made sure that whenever we ate out we either stuck to seafood or ate somewhere with an English menu (and Al avoided any more suspicious 'Chinese dumplings'). It's a good place if come if you want to go on a diet!

The people here don't seem to be as oppressed as we read in the English news, there were hardly any police officers anywhere unlike in Britain where you have them on every street corner and many Chinese we spoke to talked of holidaying or moving to different countries. Due to the one-child policy we hardly saw any children running around with their parents which was strange, in South America nearly every woman is carrying a child. There are definitely restrictions on what the people see on TV, all Chinese TV, even the English channel, only focuses on travel or history in China and is only produced by Chinese TV companies. But we were able to view hotmail and BBC Online with no problems, however Youtube was a no go.

The country is great to travel in because the transport systems are straight forward and easy to figure out, even if you don't understand the language you can ask for a ticket by simply saying your destination name and looking at the numbers on your ticket to work out the time, platform, seat etc. It's a very well organised country.

All in all we were very impressed by China and would have liked to explore some more, unfortunately we decided that summer time would be a better time to do this, when it is warm and the skies are clear... and maybe next time we'll speak a little of the language.