China

Six weeks and sixteen flights later, we are finally back from our trip to Asia, with a brief stopover both ways in San Diego.

We spent a couple weeks in China, most of it on a group tour, but with a couple days on our own in both Beijing and Shanghai. I'm not a big fan of packaged tours, but it certainly helped pack as much as possible into the short time we had. I had already been to all the cities before, but it's pretty amazing how much more modern and crowded it gets each time.

With our extra day in Beijing, we stopped by the 798 Art District, an artist community that occupies old military factory buildings. It was an eclectic mix of various art, but we enjoyed the sculpture more than other media:

The tour covered most of the touristy stuff in Beijing, of course. First up was Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace, all of which were flooded with hordes of domestic tourists. The tour scheduled the visit to be on the weekend, which probably didn't help any. The Forbidden City is pretty amazing, but there's way too much to see, especially when walking through on a group tour.

I enjoyed the Bird's Nest since it was the main site I had never seen before. It was an impressive stadium, but unfortunately pretty much unused right now except shuttling through tourists. The Water Cube must be in even worse shape since it's not a big tourist attraction.

The last big site near Beijing is the Great Wall. The weather was generally pretty good while we were in Beijing, except, of course, the day that was scheduled for the Great Wall. Yet another reason I dislike packaged group tours! Thanks to the atrocious Air China that we flew to Beijing and their screening of the critically acclaimed The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, I had already learned that the workers who died during its construction were often just buried underneath the wall. It was pretty tiring just to walk a short segment of the wall; no wonder it worked well to keep invaders out.

After Beijing, it was off to Xian to see the Terracotta Warriors. It's a good thing Jet Li wasn't around to bring them to life to raise an army. The villagers in the surrounding areas were forced to work here to put together the individually crafted, life-sized warriors. Unfortunately, that also pissed them off, causing them to break in to the tomb, destroy them all, steal their weapons, and start an uprising. Now they have to go through the slow process of excavating and then reconstructing each soldier. They must be working pretty slowly since it seemed about the same number of soldiers as the last time I went.

After seeing all the historical sites, it was off to Shanghai, where we first visited the nearby Hangzhou and Suzhou, famous for the scenery, lakes, and gardens. They were all pretty nice, but it's hard to relax and enjoy nature when it's also overcrowded by tourists.

To wrap up our stay in China, we spent a couple days in Shanghai, which is a massively metropolitan city. The traffic conditions were exacerbated by ongoing construction to prepare the city for World Expo 2010. For all the downsides to a Communist government, they sure can mobilize quickly to transform a city to put on a show for a world audience.

Here is a link to all of the pictures. I'll post about Singapore and Thailand if I still have any readers left :)