Where’s Megan?

China is… big, shiny, dirty, shop-y, strict, confusing, yummy, fascinating, and… here are some pictures:

Every major city looks the same, huge buildings with stores everywhere. Occasionally there’s a traditional Chinese monument in the city, along with the KFCs and… Mary Kay!

After a few days in the cities, I headed out to Dali, a town that still has its outer city wall, and has been preserved for the hordes of tourists (mostly Chinese tour groups) that fill its streets and quaint tea/silver/marble sculpture shops. Unfortunately it rained every minute I was there, so its enjoyability was severely hampered.

I was all set to travel further west towards some Tibetan-esque cities, but then I came down with a fever, which is the symptom for every bad traveler disease. First I tried the Dali clinic, accompanied by the woman at my guesthouse. She tried to help, but spoke no English and got angry because I didn’t want to take the unknown “injection and medicine” that the doctor ordered. I realize that she was trying to be motherly, however, the kind of mother that doesn’t listen to you and yells a lot. She also refused to take a taxi, and instead demanded that we wait for a bus and then walk about 30 minutes in the rain back to the hotel. I’m sure this is some ancient Chinese treatment for fever. I decided to head back to Kunming, a major city, to get my illness checked out at the hospital. It was a little better, definitely a professional hospital, but only resulted in me getting a clearly-wrong diagnosis and a giant bag of medicine, most of it herbal concoctions. I decided to take none of it, and instead took my antibiotics from home and felt better in a few days. And that was my Chinese Hospital experience. I give the system a C+.

Abandoning my Tibetan cities, I took a train north to Chengdu. I know I should stop comparing things to India, but WOW the trains are nice! Clean sheets, carpeted aisles, lace curtains, soothing music playing.. it was truly luxury, and this was just “2nd class”. As usual, I spent most of the journey staring at the window. The area (Sichuan province) was very mountainous, and we alternated between bridges and tunnels, no flat areas. This meant sitting through 5-10 minutes of darkness, followed by 5-10 seconds of stunning landscapes, then darkness again. It was torture.

In Chengdu, there was a cooking class being held at my guesthouse on the first day I was there, so I joined that and had a good time learning how to make some delicious Chinese dishes.

Yeah, I made that radish flower. I’m awesome.

On my second day in Chengdu, I took a trip to the Giant Panda Research Base. They had babies there, but no photos were allowed, I assume because even modern cameras aren’t built to process such an incredible amount of cuteness. So here’s some pictures of older ones being somewhat active. I had to get there early because after 9am they all go to sleep.

Hey, that’s not a Panda… It’s a Red Panda!

I walked around Chengdu, but it’s just like most other Chinese cities described above. I find it interesting how this proudly Communist country seems to be so strongly focused on creating as many shopping opportunities as possible.

So we have our good friend, Mao,

across the street from our good friend, McD.

And of course, gotta have Starbucks!

The language barrier has been challenging, but I’m actually enjoying trying to figure out the characters. In the larger cities some people speak a little English, but otherwise I have to rely on my phrasebook and dictionary. Even on TV it’s difficult to find any English. This is the closest I found, and even it was dubbed:

From here I’m taking another train to Xi’an and working my way to up Beijing, before flying back down to Hong Kong to catch my flight home. It feels a little weird to be in my final country, and especially weird that I only have about 2.5 weeks left! Weird yet welcome.

Tags: China, Travel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 1:48 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.