Category: Travel
Strolling Suzhou’s 山塘街 Shan Tang Old Street
Suzhou’s 山塘街 Shan Tang Old Street like seemingly every other old water town street in China displays the common, charming characteristics of the traditional, quaint, whitewashed buildings, red tasseled lanterns softly swinging in the breeze and canal boats chugging tourists up and down the canals.
Then of course there’s the not so charming side, the commercial side, the main drag lined with tacky souvenir shops, Suzhou embroidery shops selling the same generic embroidery as the store two doors down and any other piece of generic China wide merchandise imaginable.
Now Shan Tang Street could certainly never claim to be as …
Travel Snap: Beijing Rickshaws
Beijing is a modern city filled with far too many cars and flashy lights yet in the old neighbourhoods a piece of Chinese public transport history can be found, Rickshaws!
One of the most popular activities for tourists to do in Beijing is tour around Beijing’s famous Hutongs in one of these beautifully decorated carts pulled along by bicycle. If you’re game put yourself in the driver’s shoes and ask if you can have a go driving him around, you’ll realise just how much work it is peddling that thing a long. You just might make his day!
Hohhots Vibrancy Emerging Through the Dust
Hohhot is the capital of one of China’s most economically prosperous provinces, the Inner Mongolia autonomous region. Rich in natural resources such as coal, natural gas, rare earths and minerals Inner Mongolia is fast steaming towards being the richest economy in China. But unlike many prosperous areas of China Hohhot doesn’t show of its riches, Hohhot is more modest but is that only because the money is being funneled into other parts of China, Shanghai maybe?
In fact the biggest sign of Inner Mongolia’s economic prosperity are the coal trucks that line up full of coal for kilometer’s along …
The Chinese Airport Experience
China boasts some of the newest, flashiest airports in the world, at least that’s what it may seem like on the exterior. From the exterior China’s international airports could be international air hubs anywhere in the world complete with the trendy, glass, wave inspired curved roofs that seem to be the current airport design fashion! However once you step inside and try to kill the few hours before your flight you realise that just like most things in China, the Chinese airport experience despite it worldly facade is in fact still uniquely Chinese.
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The checking-in experience…
Check in counters …
Roaming Shanghai’s Xinchang Watertown
In proud, if imperfect English, a sign outside the History Exhibition Hall in Xinchang declares: “There standed 13 bridges and 9 memorial arches in Xinchang, which made it better than Suzhou.” The sign reappears, twice, inside the exhibition hall, and again on the wall of an unfinished information centre nearby.
Is Xinchang better than Suzhou? Perhaps, once, if goodness can be measured in bridges and memorial arches, but as the Chinglish “standed” indicates, most of these are now gone. The old town is now not much more than a single street, about a kilometre and a half long, intersected by …
