Goodbye China. For now.

Ni Hao!

I am sitting at the Kunming Airport right now waiting for my connection to Hanoi, Vietnam. I can now consider China (at least Shanghai and Beijing) something I have experienced for myself. As my first foray into solo international travelling, I would rate this a fantastic success. I have learned so much about travelling alone. So much about myself. And so much of another culture.

I learned that when travelling solo, you accommodation becomes one of the most important factors. It shapes your experience of a city.
I found the language barrier to be quite difficult at times, but I never went hungry. I learned to try to do less in a day. I was happy if I could navigate to one site to see and get a meal in the same day.
Orientation and transportation were the most difficult. The strangest thing is that when you translate a street name from Chinese to Pingyang (phonetic based) it becomes quite difficult to translate it back. The guidebooks show everything in Pingyang, so trying to get it translated to Chinese to show a taxi driver is always a crap shoot. I also found it odd that I would point to an intersection on a map and it would invariably take several minutes of the taxi driver staring blankly at the map before you started moving. Even then I would sometimes get dropped off a few blocks from my desired destination.
I learned to take all of these things in stride...they are part of the experience.

I really enjoyed my time in Beijing. It is a city I could definitely spend more time in, and I know that I will return someday. Although next time, I don't wish to do it alone.

If for nothing else, then for the dumplings. I love them.

So, I am saddened to be leaving China, but I am really looking forward to the next couple of days in Hanoi. The company of Julie, Richard, and my mom will be a welcome change to the solitude of the last couple weeks.

I will post more pictures and share more stories from Julie's house where I can reduce the image file sizes and the internet is in English.

Goodbye China...Thanks for the memories!