SPECIAL NOTE: MY SON, JEFF, HAS BEEN ENCOURAGING ME TO SEND MORE PICTURES WITH MY BLOGS. WHEN I BEGAN, THIS SITE ONLY ALLOWED SO MANY, BUT THAT HAS CHANGED. SO, THIS TIME I HAVE INCLUDED MANY MORE PHOTOS. THIS IS A LOT OF WORK FOR ME, SO I REALLY WANT TO KNOW FROM YOU WHETHER OR NOT YOU LIKE SEEING BUNCHES OF PHOTOS LIKE THIS. IS THIS TOO MUCH? WAS 3-4 JUST RIGHT OR TOO LITTLE, LET ME KNOW. I DON'T MIND DOING IT IF YOU ACTUALLY ARE ENJOYING THE BLOG MORE WITH LOTS MORE PICTURES, BUT, IF NOT, WELL.... REMEMBER: [View Full Entry]

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First of all, Shanghai is huge. Maybe that is stating the obvious (fact: it has twice as many skyscrappers as NYC) but one can ride on a bus for a an awful long time that looks on the map to be quite near. Being so large, it is also very conjested. So much so that I'm not so sure that I actually couldn't have walked to the places I spent several hours busing to. I stayed in the area they call The Bund. This is where all the European powers in the 19th centruy built their buildings and went about their [View Full Entry]

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Most Three Gorge tours start in Chongqing (used to be Chunking before Mao started changing things. Short history lesson: (source, LP) In 1958 the Chinese adopted a system of writing their language using the Roman alphabet, known as pinyin. The original idea was to eventually do away with characters. However, tradition dies hard, and the idea was abandoned. Nowadays most don't even know how to use it. This shouldn't surprise us. We can't even make the switch to the metric system, which the whole world, other than us, uses. Sounds, though that have helped me: Q=ch, and ZH=j and X=sh as [View Full Entry]

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For the past 40+ years, one of the places I have always longed to see was the Li River area. It is that part of China that we always see in pictures with these mountains rising from the ground, many times looking like they are standing alone next to others of different sizes and shapes. They extend all along this beautiful winding river and into the surrounding valleys. I can honestly say, even though I have probably seen hundreds of pictures and more than one documentary of them over the years, they do not disappoint. These mountains are called Karst landforms [View Full Entry]

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My first stop in China was the province of Guangxi (west of Guangzhou). That is, if one doesn't count Macao and Hong Kong, which, apparently even the Chinese don't in some ways (i.e., no visas necessary, different rules, and even a different feeling. One commentator stated that nothing would please Beijing better than to have Shanghai surpass Hong Kong as the super-city of China. That tells a lot right there.) One thing worth mentioning now is that cities 5 to 10 times the size of Portland, whose names I have never heard of are all over China. Dozens of them. Qingdao [View Full Entry]

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Caveat: Almost anyone can take better pictures than I of big buildings. If you want to see Hong Kong today, it's there on the net and done far better than I. So, those photos I share with you are the one's you probably won't see on a travelogue, but have somehow struck me as 'memorable'. Remember, you can double click on the pictures and they enlarge. enjoy! Hi All, this is the first China blog Lucky me, I was sharing a seat from Bangkok airport with this young Chinese woman who was in the travel business. She had just flown in [View Full Entry]

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