Impressions

One of the purposes of this trip was to give Seth some broad impressions of his homeland.  I'm not sure how deeply he'd be able to express those just yet - maybe we'll prompt him to post about that - but I certainly came away with some.

1.  The one-child policy is going to go down as one of the dumbest public policy decisions in history.  But traveling in a country of 1.45 Billion people, you do at least gain a little understanding of why they did it.  There are people everywhere.  We visited Xian, which has 8 million residents, and they describe it as a mid-sized city.  It's bigger than NYC, FWIW.  We took a cruise on the Yangtze which exposed us to a little "countryside", but even then we passed through 3-4 cities with dozens of high-rise apartment buildings along the riverbanks.  And the traffic in Beijing is beyond obscene.  The bicycle riders we saw 7 years have been all but vanquished-  there is no room for them.  It regularly took about 30 minutes to go about 2 miles anywhere within the downtown core.  Most streets are lined with fences to prevent pedestrian crossing, and tunnel underpasses are built for walkers.

2.  I'm not thinking of becoming a Communist, but state control has its benefits.  Not being able to access Facebook or our blog (directly) was aggravating, but an internet without porn can't be a bad thing.  Nearly every public restroom had both hand dryers AND paper towels (though not always toilet paper - I can't quite figure that one out).  Oh, and I don't think our silly bathroom wars have made it to China.  They also claim to not have a terrorism problem, and they have the stats to back it up.

3.  Apparently etiquette is cultural.  Chinese generally don't understand the concept of queuing.  I realize there are other countries that also suffer from this blindspot, but it really is quite amazing to have people repeatedly shove (literally) right past you to get ahead.  And watching a kid drop her drawers and pee in public wasn't something I would have been surprised to see in an African village or Indian countryside, but seeing it in line at Shanghai Disney was a bit jarring.

4.  Come to think of it, they ignore a lot of rules.  There are signs in all the airports not to push those luggage trolleys up against the baggage claim carousels.  Completely ignored.  The signs at Disney prohibiting photographing or videoing the shows?  Also roundly ignored.  Somehow they must have figured how in a police state to know which are the important rules, and which ones you can just flout. 

5. Another consequence of the high concentration of people is the smog.  We saw very little of the sun during the 2 weeks.  In fairness, some of that was due to plain cloud cover and fog (much of which along the Yangtze seems to have been created by the massive Dam project).  But in Xian and Beijing in particular, the air was suffocating.  Kathleen and Josie were going to run one day in Xian, but bagged it because they were going to suffer a coughing fit right out of the gate.  We had decent views of downtown when we went up the Shanghai Pearl Tower, but anything beyond a mile or so was pure haze.

6.  I do have a newfound appreciation for the Chinese people's resilience.  Be it the Mongols, the Brits, the Japanese, the "central kingdom" has been getting knocked around for years, and still manages to be a significant player on the world stage.  They seem to be moving (slowly) past the damages down by Mao; let's hope they continue to do so.