Only our second land border crossing of the trip: China to Hong Kong. Despite being a part of China, Hong Kong maintains separate border controls. It also has its own money, they drive on the opposite side of the road as the mainland, and English is widely spoken, after all it has only been thirteen years since the Brits left town.
Something we noticed right off the bat, private companies print money here. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, or HSBC, is a large bank we have been seeing …

With one week left in China, we had several places we still wanted to see. It seems that everywhere we look there is a city here with more than a million people, and we still wanted to find something a bit quieter. We decided to go west from Xi’an to higher, and cooler, ground. This is the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, and we thought we’d find something different here out. It took another overnight train to get to Xining, another place home to over a million.
We had hoped …

China is huge, so getting roughly to the middle takes a long time. High speed trains are reserved for the east coast so to get to Xi’an we split the trip into two overnight legs. Also, due to the Expo, tickets out of Shanghai are sold out quickly, unless of course you want to stand for 36 hours rather than getting a seat or bed on the train.
China has had multiple capitals and Kaifeng falls on the list of one of the Seven Ancient Capitals. But, like most other …

An inspiring article in an in-flight magazine a few months back convinced us to add Shanghai to our list of places to visit this summer. It turns out that the World’s Fair is being held this year, and an event that gave us the ice cream cone and the Eiffel Tower is surely not to be missed. Mike was a little disappointed to learn that the event is not actually called the World’s Fair anymore. Now it is just known as “the Expo”, which sounds a lot less spectacular. Even …

After the commotion of Beijing, we were looking forward to spending a few days somewhere quieter. A sacred mountain and the home town of Confucius were on the way to Shanghai and that sounded like the perfect stop. The town of Tai’an still had plenty of energy and the mountain is a pilgrimage for Chinese people so we didn’t really find the peaceful spot we were looking for. We did get to climb up about 7,000 steps, so it was still a productive day.
We arrived on the bullet train from …

Mike’s birthday, we easily memorized our first full day in China months ago. Without a lot of research and given the convenience from our hostel, we hit up some of the most well known attractions on the first day out. We visited Tiananmen Square and the final resting place of Chairman Mao. Interesting that he is covered with red blanket with the Soviet hammer and sickle. Most of our afternoon was spent inside the Forbidden City. We quickly learned that everything is set up along the cardinal directions, with north …