The following pages are excerpts from the journal I took during my trip to China in December 2002. I thoroughly enjoyed my trip. I went with a great Chinese friend who took care of, like, everything, so I could just keep my eyes open and enjoy myself. We were there three weeks and visited six cities.
The journal is mostly full of observations - things I found interesting, things I noticed, things different to Australia - as well as a record of what I did and where I went (this may be less interesting but I kept it in just in case someone cares ^_^.). The Beijing entries are ordered by topic rather than dates and is more disjointed than entries for the other cities. I wrote more on Beijing because we were there longest and it was the first place we went - many of the things I noticed about Beijing apply to the other cities we visited. Any comments in [square brackets] are ones I wrote after coming back.
Yes, I wrote a lot. ^_^.
Beijing (observations/shopping/food/etc)
Beijing (famous places visited)
Xi'an
Shanghai
Hangzhou
Shenzhen and Hong Kong
China in general
Names have been changed.
Disclaimer: the tours I went on in China were conducted in Mandarin. I didn't understand a word. Sometimes I didn't even know where we were going or what the names of certain sites were. My friend translated some of it for me as best she could and what I picked up I recorded. But what I'm saying is, in these entries there may be the odd fact or place name or piece of historical information that is not necessarily perfectly accurate. I think most of it's okay but I did get it from word of mouth and from some hurried translations and may not have got it all perfect.
