Shanghai is all you would expect from a modern city of 24+ million people. It’s huge, vibrant, noisy, sometimes smelly and chaotic especially the traffic (seems to be normal in China). Depending on the size your wallet you can spend any amount of time here without getting bored. Food comes in all shapes and sizes from cheap but good street food to more expensive upper class restaurants which can still be quite affordable, but you also have the extremes for people…
Roundabout thousandonehundred kilometers and only five and a half hours on the train after we had left Beijing, we arrived in Xi’An. To cover this distance would have taken at least 24 hours on the Transsiberian Train. Luckily, we took China’s high speed bullet-train, called “G-Train”, which flew with 300 kilometres an hour past big and growing cities that no one has ever heard of who hasn’t been to China. Xi’An is just another eight and a half-million-people-metropolis. There…
I remember the host of a tea house in the Japan Alps, who explained to us why he didn’t like Chinese tourists too much. They would come in large busses and numbers, make a lot of noise, take a lot of pictures and set off, never going beyond the main attraction. So here we are now, in the motherland of mass tourism. And clearly one main attraction not to be missed is the Great Wall. After already having experienced first hand what touristy…