Welcome!

Welcome to our China trip journal! We will be departing Virginia Beach on July 7 and traveling to Beijing, Guilin, Chengdu, Changsha, Nanchang, and Fuzhou. This is our third trip to China and this time it's a heritage tour for Amanda and Allyson. It is our hope that they will benefit from personal exposure to the country and culture of their birth.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Welcome to Chengdu

Our flight to Chengdu was pretty uneventful. Our seats were split two and two on consecutive rows, and Amanda and I ended up sitting with a gregarious Chinese man who, by the time we landed in Chengdu, had managed to communicate (between his broken English and my broken Mandarin), that he lives in Chengdu, has two children who are university students, and will be travelling to England for the Olympics later this month. I managed to explain that I have four children and that we were travelling with our two adopted Chinese children to their hometowns of Changsha and Fuzhou. I think if I were fluent enough in Chinese, or he in English, the man would have talked non-stop for the entire 90 minute flight.
We met our guide, Kevin, at the airport and made the roughly 40-minute ride to our hotel. It turns out that Chengdu is the fourth largest city in China with a population of over 15 million people. I had no idea it was so big. The area around our hotel is considered the high rent district, and the shops we passed on the way in, Gucci, Versace, and Louis Vuitton would seem to confirm that. We’ll not be doing much shopping in this neighborhood.
Tomorrow is a light day. We are scheduled to visit Wangjiang Bamboo  Park in the morning and a brocade factory in the afternoon. Each province in China has a product (or products) that it is known for. Before FoxConn built an iPad assembly plant here, Chengdu was best known for its brocade and its Giant Panda breeding center. We can’t bring home a panda, but you can bet there will be some brocade in our luggage when we return to Virginia.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.