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China was a revelation to us. We were surprised both by the good and the bad. We never expected the people to be so friendly nor the air to be so dirty. The country is racing headlong into the 21st century, trying to make up for centuries of isolation and decades of communism. As a result, the people do not share many of the customs of the developed world and the landscape is suffering from the effects of rapid, rampant industrialization. It took us a while to get used to the constant spitting and smoking and the grime, but we’d never let them stand in the way of discovering all this fascinating country has to offer. Here are the top 6 things we learned while traveling the country:

1. A big family is a happy family. It must be because the first thing all the Chinese people say to us, after establishing that all four children actually belong to us, is “What a happy family.”

2. Breathing is good. We are much happier and healthier when we get to. Too bad the Chinese don’t very often given the smog levels and dedication to smoking.

3. Do not travel between cities on Saturdays or Sundays, also known to the Chinese as holidays. Cabs won’t pick you up and if they do, only for an inflated rate. Train stations, bus stations, and city streets are packed with people and everything is more difficult.

4. As if there were any doubt in our minds already, public spitting, nose blowing, and loogie hawking is disgusting. (Almost EVERYONE does it.)

5. Hostels can be fun and only sometimes are disgusting. Even when they are, the other travelers you meet help diminish the pain and prove a valuable source of information.

6. If you’re going to ride a city bus, wear your crummy pants, because they might well get razored.

Technorati Tags: China, Family travel, hostels, Pollution, Round the world, Round-the-world, RTW, Smoking, Spitting

We ate like pigs in China. The food is cheap, plentiful and tasty and far superior to anything we’ve gotten in Chinese restaurants at home. By the time we got to Yangshou, the younger kids were ready for some Western food and went back to their old favorites of pizza and lasagna. Dax could eat Chinese all day everyday, and with the exception of needing a good steak every now and then, dispense with Western food completely. I was happy I could eat order three entrees for $4 and Tom was in culinary heaven. (See his Getting Fat in Beijing post for more details.) Here are our favorite foods from our month in the land of Mao.

1. Asher — Pizza at the China Cafe, Yangshou
2. Kieran — Lasagna at the China Cafe, Yangshou
3. McKane — Sweet and Sour Pork
4. Dax — Fried Rice
5. Anne — Sesame Balls
6. Tom — Szechuan Hot Pot or maybe sauteed pork and eggplant, or maybe tea roasted duck, or maybe Kung Pao chicken, or maybe spare ribs

Technorati Tags: China, Family travel, food, Round the world, Round-the-world, RTW

China was a major surprise for us. We went in fearing coldness and rigidity and instead found only warmth and flexibility. We were overwhelmed by the affection the Chinese people showed us and don’t doubt much of it was because we are a family, or as the Chinese like to say “big, happy family.” This led to some parenting problems since any time we tried to discipline the kids, for example, scolding Asher for dancing on the table at a restaurant, the Chinese would intervene and tell us it was ok. There was so much to see and do it seemed a travesty of travel justice to spend only one month in the country. We made the best of our 30 days though, and here are our favorite things to do:

1. Asher — Dance with fauxhawk wearing fancy guys outside discos (because you’re too young to actually go inside)
2. Kieran — Visit pandas in Chengdu and walk on the Big Buddha at Leshan
3. McKane — Master the art of negotiating with vendors at the Silk Market in Beijing
4. Dax — Hike the Great Wall from Jintanling to Simatai
5. Anne –Teach English to sweet, beautiful kids in Yangshou
6. Tom — Marvel at the scenery in Jiuzhaigou and eat, eat, eat!

Technorati Tags: Beijing, Chengdu, China, Family travel, Great Wall, Juizhaigou, Leshan, Round the world, Round-the-world, RTW, Volunteering, Yangshou

What a wacky, wonderful month we had in China. A big part of us didn’t want to leave, but with only eleven months, twenty some countries to visit, and visas that expired on the 16th, we knew our time had come. Guilin the second time was just as mellow as thIMG_0581.JPGe first, though this time we actually had to face the ill-reputed taxi drivers at the bus station. As in Xi’an, no one wanted to take the Americans to their destination just a short distance away. Yet again it was a Saturday (you’d think we would have learned not to travel on a weekend in China), and drivers could be choosy given the abundance of potential customers. Though no one was excited about the prospect, we had resolved ourselves to walking the mile to the Sheraton when a nice young man in a pink shirt approached us and asked if he could help. After five minutes of negotiating, he had arranged two cabs off the meter for only a slightly inflated rate. Our new friend was so concerned that we not be ripped off, that he rode with Tom in the first cab to ensure the drivers actually took us where we wanted to go for the agreed upon price. This guy didn’t want to sell us anything or get anything from us; he just wanted to help us. Before he left, he warned, “All Chinese are not your friends.”

His concern was touching and a fitting farewell from a country that, for the most part, embraced us warmly. (I hope it’s embraced my iPod with my affection as well.) There were many things that frustrated us, but more that delighted us. The biggest takeaway from our encounter with China is sheer amazement at what it has accomplished in such a short time and what it most certainly will accomplish in the coming years. At home we don’t pay much attention, but we’d better start. While we flounder in public debt, this country has $1 trillion in foreign currency reserves, much of it in dollars. Foreign investment is flowing in faster than skyscrapers and factories can be built. A billion and a half people who for decades were prevented from freely earning or spending money are gradually building up bank accounts, and the world’s businesses are salivating at the prospect of peddling their wares to these prospective customers. China’s power and influence are growing exponentially. One US official recently compared China’s 21st century rise to that of the United States in the early 20th century. This is big stuff, and most of us, myself included, sit at home and think no more than how glad we are that we can buy cheap goods at Wal-Mart because the Chinese are willing to make them for us. The Chinese still have huge obstacles to overcome–pollution, corruption, a lack of basic personal freedoms–but if we don’t get our Western heads out of the sand, we’ll be making their tchotchkes someday.

Technorati Tags: China, Family travel, Guangxi, Guilin, Round the world, Round-the-world, RTW

I had very high hopes for fast internet connections as we travelled through China and beyond. I have been watching from afar as China has become the world’s fastest growing broadband country. The price of DSL is incredibly low and people all across China have been quickly signing up for the service. In fact, in the near future China will have the most internet users on the planet. 30 days in China have been enough for me to say, however, “Somebody help these people.: They think they have broadband but they don’t. They have some of the slowest DSL connections I have ever experienced. Every time we connect to the internet, I make it a point to test out the speed of the connection. I also use a set of internet products which utilize both upstream and downstream bandwidth. All the connections in China have been miserably slow. The fastest I have witnessed on this trip has been in Utah. Our stop there was at my parents’ house. They were trying out their municipal fiber connection. It always tested between 6-10mb and came with phone and video services. They can tell you about the troubles with both the phone and video service, but the internet connection was fast and fairly reliable. Had we spent more time in Korea I could have imbibed from the world’s fastest service at around 100mb. In our day there, I didn’t have time to find or utilize the service. Australia and New Zealand had moderate service with speeds between 512k and 1.5mb. The downfall for those poor people is their service is metered. Once they have gone over their alloted amount of traffic, they drop down to 56k for the rest of the month. I can’t think of a worse way to treat your customers. Oh yeah, I can: call your service broadband and give them slower than dial-up speeds. Even in the few upscale hotels we stayed at the service was miserable. At our hotel in Guilin the broadband was so slow, 12k, I had to go to a hostel across the street and use their much faster (160k) wireless service. For those who don’t pay attention to the speed of your connection, the hotel was moving at the rate of a dial-up modem from 1992. Everywhere we went the service was about 150k to 250k.The fastest we found was around 256k at the Sheraton in Jiuzhaigou. I was amazed how many things were impacted by these slow speeds. I have a set of things I would like to do with sixintheworld and a couple of other things I would like to get started, but at those speeds everything is a chore.

Slow Internet changes a lot of things. I created sixintheworld to be optimized for broadband. I apologize to our dial-up readers. It isn’t fair, but as the family log, I wanted it to be rich in pictures, video and other multimedia. However, it has been hard to keep up with slow connections in China and the lack of connections in many of the places we stayed in New Zealand and Australia. Those who know me, understand that my optimism knows no bounds and I am expecting better things in Southeast Asia. Cambodia and Laos will be tough, but Vietnam and Thailand have growing broadband and hopefully do not struggle with their service levels as much as China.

Technorati Tags: Broadband, China, Internet, New Zealand

One of my jobs on this trip is to keep a pretty close eye on the expenses. It isn’t a hard job and if I don’t crash anything or lose anything, it isn’t particularly painful either. I am trying to keep track so that we understand what the average cost for 6 people is in the different countries and cities we visit. Australia and New Zealand were about what we expected, China has been cheaper than we planned. We’ve had the occasional splurge, primarily one set of plane tickets, but for the most part we have lived comfortably without spending much money. Yangshou ended up being our cheapest city. For the 5 days we were there we lived on less than $75 dollars a day. I thought this was pretty good, I doubt the family has ever lived on $75 dollars a day since there has been more than 3 of us. We were also doing it fairly painlessly. As I took pride in our artificial penury, I was smacked in the face with a figure that quickly humbled me. Laurie and I were talking about the life of the locals and he commented, “The daily wage for a laborer is 30-40 yuan, or about $3.80-$5.00. Our $75 a day became less a metric to be proud of and more yet another example of our plenty.

Let me point out labor in China is not like labor in America. It is not like labor in Japan, Korea, Europe or any other part of the developed world. It is back breaking, put-you-in-an-early-grave, sorry-we-have no-machines-to-help-you, you-must-do-it-all-by-hand labor. Watch people dig holes by hand, move mountains of rock on their backs, or repair the Great Wall with donkeys and you get a deep appreciation for the amount of work these people have to do just to stay alive.

You also become thankful for even your worst day at the office. In the few instances where I could ask working people about their lives, I was amazed by their answers. There was the taxi driver in Beijjing. I asked him if he worked 5 or 6 days a week. He said 7. I asked him his hours and he said 10 to 10 everyday. He had a daughter who was going to university and this was the only way he could pay. There was the girl who ran the restaurant at the hostel in Xian. We were amazed that we would see her at 7am and 1am every day. She opened and closed it. At least she only worked 6 days a week. Then there are all the people I couldn’t ask. The old people who appear to be all that are left in the villages, who are working in the fields or are hunched over from the various burdens they carry on their backs. China is a harsh place for them. I think of what they’ve been through, from the failed communist blunders, like the famines after the Great Leap Forward and the bloody Red Guard of the Cultural Revolution. Even before the communists, China has existed only on the backs and through the energy of its peasants. I was intellectually aware of this but was surprised it was quite so blatant still today. For younger people there is good news. The last 15 years have brought about great change. There is a burgeoning middle class, there are more opportunities for the youth, and if China can avoid an ecological disaster from the pollution and falling water table, this place should grow for years to come raising the living standards of future generations. However, this generation of older peasants will be left behind. They will go on and figure out how to continue to live on less than $5 a day. They will deliver the food, remove the rubbish, and clean the streets, and new China will pass them by.

For us it means we are a little less critical when the taxi driver charges us an extra $.25 or the orange vendor charges us a foreigner surcharge of $.12. Sure it all adds up and in the end we might spend $80 a day. $5 for us isn’t going to make a difference, but for the lower class Chinese, it is the same as 12 hours of hard labor. That’s a price we can afford to pay.

Technorati Tags: China, labor, Round the world, RTW, work

Yangshou, the center of backpackers and foreigners in general throughout the whole of China. A city where Chinese are a minority compared to the large number of tourists. A place where you can get western food as good as at home. Or so Lonely Planet had told us. We entered Yangshao to find out that none of these things were true. I must agree with some other bloggers who called their Lonely Planet, Lying Planet. Yangshao for the most part was a quiet city, not a rowdy backpackers’ town as I had heard. There were at least fifteen Chinese to every foreigner, and they were still obsessed with grabbing Asher for pictures, a skill which it seemed no Chinese could master since Asher would bolt away and hide every time anyone got remotely close to her. Definitley not a place where foreigners are as commonplace as Chinese. Aside from the tours on the Li River, the Yangshou Mud Caves, and so forth, all that there was in the quiet town of 300,000 was a single street packed with restaurants and discos. As I would soon find out, this is where we would be spending most of our time. On our first night we walked down the long street, awe struck by how many discos could be packed into such a small space. We checked out a few restaurants and then decided on the China Cafe, which looked as if it could be quite good, since it was stuffed with people. We ordered a good deal of food, and found that at least the guide books were right on one thing, the food was amazing.

The China Cafe had somehow managed to master the art of Italian cooking, since the pasta, lasagna, and pizza were the kids’ favorites. Kieran for the first time ate a decent amount of food, well maybe a bit more than a decent amount, he stuffed in the pizza and lasagna. Despite their Italian food, they still needed to work on the traditional hamburger; my mom ordered one and got a frozen meat patty on a bun with maybe ten fries to accompany it. For the rest of us we found that the China Cafe offered good fried rice, sweet and sour pork, and staged the best sizzling beef plate we have yet to taste. We managed to buy two fried rice plates, sizzling beef, sweet and sour pork, three cheese pizzas, a plate of pasta, garlic spare ribs, roast goose and beef noodles for under twenty dollars, finally cutting down on food costs after insanely priced Australia and New Zealand, I mean three bucks for a candy bar? Come on Aussie! All around us were other restaurants with live music. To my disappointment not a single drum set was to be found. All the bands used tambourines and keyboard beats. Their ability to play was alright, but as for the singing, um, let’s just say that half the time I thought some drunks were doing karaoke. We also noticed that every band at some time played a collection of American 60’s through 80’s hits, a fact that made me want to jump off a bridge again. The discos were hopping, people packed into them to show off their dancing skills. The problem is that in a country where the only indigenous instruments are flutes and a single string instrument, you don’t build a good rhythm base among most people, and so most end up dancing like McKane, Kieran and Asher, a lot of jumping around with no real connection to the beat. But for the younger kids this proved to be the most fun thing of all. At the first disco we passed we saw a very fashionable man outside bouncing to the music in an interesting fashion and yelling at people to come to his disco. We decided to have some fun. Mac and I hopped up. I started doing various odd moves while Mac jumped around of course! The man didn’t like it at all so we left him. The kids continued to dance in the front of this disco EVERY night and drew in huge crowds. Every time they came the man would go inside get a beer and come back out, while his female colleague loved the kids and told them to come dance any time they wanted. Aside from eating at the China Cafe every night (we only ate at another restaurant for dinner once and it paled in comparison, even the director of the Yangshao English school had told us China Cafe was some of the best food in town)

The other main attraction was an arcade like area dedicated solely to a game called ‘Street Ball.’ It’s basically one of those basketball games like at Chuck E. Cheese’s where you try and score as many baskets as possible in a given time limit, and if you do well enough you move on to the next round. We spent hours playing constantly challenging each other to see who could get the high score, our dad basically owning our faces in every time. But even the great Tom couldn’t stand up to the Asian women who consistently made 15 or 16 baskets in a row with little to no effort. We finished up in Yangshao with one last night out. We ate to our heart’s content in the China Cafe, danced and created a giant crowd at the disco, and took the little kids to get lollipops. We bid farewell to Yangshao with a good impression made inside us. If one ever goes to China and is searching for a place to relax or have a good time, come to Yangshao. There you should find something for everyone.

Technorati Tags: Dance, food, puppy, Round-the-world, RTW, Travel, Travel Writing, Yangshou

McKane’s weekly post will be in comic book form.

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