8/12/15
Our departing flight wasn’t taking off until late afternoon
and we had planned on taking the morning to visit some of the sights we had
missed as a group – mainly Mao’s tomb. Needless to say, after staying up at the
bar with our group mates until 2am in an elongated farewell, no sightseeing
occurred. Instead, we decided to take it easy and enjoy a lazy half-day
instead.
It was a really great experience and as cumbersome and
highly scheduled as the group tour was at times, I really appreciated having
our tour guide not only translate everything for us, but provide us with
informative and entertaining history and culture lessons. China is a vast and
beautiful country with such an abundance of history and regional differences
that it’s well worth multiple visits. However, there’s no telling if and when
we’ll ever get back here, but I certainly hope we do. I will miss the food most
of all but I certainly won’t miss the blanket of smog, the plethora of
cigarettes (6 billion cigarettes sold a day in a nation of only 1.4 billion
people), or the Great Red Wall that is online censorship. Unlimited internet
access (and what would turn out to be a surprisingly brutal 9 days of
incapacitating jetlag) here we come! [NN: Man what was up with the jet lag!? It
is definitely easier on the body to travel to the west than east. However,
China was quite a great experience and the country is obviously so full of
emerging power energy. The massive crowds everywhere really brought home the
huge population and must say traveling with a guide is about the only way to do
it.]
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