China calling

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I have to apologize so badly for not writing anything about our vacation to China. I was planning to make a vlog about it, but since I left only one month after China to Mexico I didn’t find the courage to start editing. Now I have to edit footage from two holidays into vlogs. HELP!

My husband and I planned a year ago to go back to China. It has been 3 years since my internship in Shanghai? And I started missing the Asian culture again. We planned a trip to the capital Beijing, stayed for 4 days, took a flight to Hongkong, stayed for 4 days and flew further to Hainan, Sanya, a southern island of China and stayed for one week to relax after two intense city trips.

First of all, I like flying with Hainan Airlines to China, but it doesn’t give you time to adapt to the Chinese mentality. The flights are full of Asian people and immediately you get confronted that you will be a minority as being a Western in China.

Arriving in Beijing, we stepped right into a tourist trap by taking an illegal taxi. I got so angry as they wanted to rip us off and my Mandarin Chinese got back fluently! I did not speak any Chinese since my studies 3 years ago!

Beijing is crowded and traffic can be hard sometimes. We decided to navigate ourselves through Beijing by taking the metro. I am not going to tell stories about all the things we visited because it was so much, but I will give you an overview: Forbidden City, Tiananmen,  Temple of Heaven, the different Hutongs, the Silk Market, Lama Temple, Summer Palace, Olympic Sites. The greatest thing was that we went to The Great Wall (Badaling) & The Ming Tombs.

Beijing is a very friendly and it is ruled by a familial atmosphere. The food is delicious as we randomly stepped into local restaurants and ordered plenty of food by a menu existing out of pictures.

The short time we’ve been here and the so many things that you can visit, got us knocked out every evening and we slept like a baby.

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After four days in the capital we took our flight to Hong Kong. This is New York in China, like Shanghai with the skyscrapers, many restaurants, shops and long streets. What really stroke me was the different kind of climate there is in Hong Kong. So warm and humid. Everyone uses an airconditioning with temperatures going down more than 10° outside. Every time you came out of a building the heat just knocked you down. An overview of all visited places: The Peak, The Ladies Market, Clock Tower, Tsim Tsa Shui street, Lan Kwai Fong, Mong Kong…

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Last but not least we flew to Hainan, beautiful Sanya. This island is not very known to Western people although a lot of Asian people spend their family holidays in this paradise. We found ourselves relaxing in a beautiful tropical hotel. Next to the many hotels that they are building here, you can’t find a lot yet. It’s all nature and open fields, palm trees and tropical vegetation. The beach here is also very nice and the waves are convenient for surfing. As we visited enough the past weeks, we didn’t visit anything in here.

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We planned this trip all ourselves and I must say that I am very proud we did so well. People can book this kind of holidays with a guided organization spending so much more money than they ever should, but we managed to visit all by ourselves. It is handy that I speak Chinese. Otherwise you are lost in this country or easily ripped off.

China had my heart for some reason. Although there are not a lot of people who feel connected with Chinese culture & habits, I feel like I could fit in here. It is bustling and you do need your personal space to survive here, but there is so much to do in beautiful China. For now we visited Shanghai, Beijing, Hongkong and Hainan, Sanya, it’s enough to have an overall impression about China, but I hope to get more opportunities to visit the more rural parts too.

In case you are prepping a visit to one of the places we did and you feel in need of our knowledge or information. Please feel free to contact me and I will provide you with all the information that I Have.

Xoxo

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