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Well, the trip was quite an experience, and I hope to go several more times in the future. The Chinese people were all very friendly, even though I was Lao Wai (rough translation is 'foreigner' or 'outsider') with a Chinese wife. Though, we did get a lot of looks and stares, none were threatening or anything. More like a curiosity. I am 100% sure, though, that if I was a single white male in China, I would have no trouble finding dates with local girls.
We went on a 6 day, 6 night tour and then visited my wife’s family in the lovely city of Nanjing. The tour hit most of the big sights in Beijing, Shanghai, as well as Suzhou & Hangzhou (old saying from Marco Polo days – "In heaven there is paradise, on Earth, there are Hangzhou & Suzhou")
Most surprising things –
1) In all the major cities, 99% of the street signs are in Chinese & English
2) Restaurants are often enormous, sometimes having hundreds of tables over several floors and most have numerous private rooms.
3) Starbucks coffee in China still tastes like battery acid, just like here.
The Great Wall, as Richard Nixon said, sure is a Great Wall. It is often very steep and the steps are quite often at random heights & widths – sometimes you get normal steps, other times they are 16-20" high, other times, they are 1-3" high. It is not handicapped friendly, and I would not bring young children. (China overall was not very friendly to the handicapped, I would say) Climbing the Great Wall is a challenge for adults and older children, and not for a person with a fear of heights. For sheer size, though, I was actually more impressed with the Ming City wall around Nanjing – 20 miles long and about 40-45 feet high and 25 feet wide at the top.
I think I liked the Forbidden City the best of all the tourist sights. It was just a remarkable amount of intricate work in all the buildings. (And, all the signs noting points of interest are in English & Chinese and are brought to you by American Express.) The Summer Palace was also impressive – they have a covered corridor that is 700 meters long and has thousands of paintings along the way depicting a couple of famous Chinese stories in picture form.
A few more comments. It can be a shopper's paradise, but you can still go to plenty of high end department stores and pay through the nose. My Ray Ban sunglasses broke a few days into the trip, and when I went into a store thinking I'd be able to pay $8 - $10 for a new pair, I was shocked to find a price of 1,500 RMB (about $185-$190) on the ones I liked. But, my wife bought a business suit for herself – jacket & skirt – for $8.50.
If you go with a Chinese person, do not go near them if they are bargaining the price – my wife was alone looking at some pearl jewelry and was looking at items that were $100-$150. As soon as they found out she had an American husband, they started pulling out the gold & silver pearls with price tags in the $3,000 to $4,000 range. Another time, while walking through the Fuzi Miao shopping area in Nanjing, I was alone for a bit, and one vendor saw me and called out "hello" in English, and as soon as the other vendors heard her speak in English, they all scrambled to the front of their booths calling out "Hello" or "Hello, come in" to me – like sharks that smell blood.
Chinese bicyclists may be the bravest people in the world – I cannot count how many times I thought our tour bus or taxi was going to run down some cyclists. They weave in & out of cars without any apparent care for oncoming traffic or blind spots.
Shanghai is awesomely huge – 14 years ago, they had 45 skyscrapers, now they have 3,000 and counting. Construction is everywhere and there are banks on every corner. While it will not happen overnight, I can see Shanghai some day supplanting New York as the world's leading financial center, especially if the dollar collapses due to Bush's economic policies. (Of course, Shanghai still has to pass Hong Kong in its own country...) It is also the least Chinese city I saw - it does not have nearly as many of those traditional Chinese style buildings as Beijing with the sweeping roofs.
City centers seem to hold most of the wealth, and if you get further from the city, the poorer the neighborhoods. Beijing downtown was impressive, but then outside the city, you get miles of what looks like run down tenement buildings badly in need of roof repairs, or with missing windows. If there weren’t clothes hanging in the windows, you’d think they were abandoned buildings waiting to be razed.
One difference I did notice was that in America, I know very few men that smoke. When I worked previously in a big corporation, the outdoor 'smoking pits' were generally 90-95% female. In China, it is the men that do most of the smoking. Women seem to run the show in most of the small businesses that I saw.
The most common "American" things I saw were KFC, McDonald's, Haagen Dazs, Starbucks and Pizza Hut. In places like KFC & McDonald's, you do not have to clean your own tables.
And, yes, the food was good. Most meals, I had 10+ items to choose from, so I could always find at least a few items I liked.
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