My parents came to visit me
A short note only: Being in China feels like being home. I went back to this absolutely amazing country four times on this trip. And now my parents came to see me in Hong Kong - one more reason why it feels so good to be here. Conditions applied for my parents to visit me though: I said 'I don't wonna see any suitcase when you arrive' and it worked. Both my parents (65 and 60 years old) came backpacking with their youngest son through China. How cool is that? Both are retired now and all the time of the world. I guess some friends from home must have declared them insane following into the footsteps of their son, sleeping in budget hotels for a handful of dollars and eating market food on dirty side streets. And it was such a great experience for all of us. We had so much fun! Just ordering food in China is a mission in itself and I tried hard to get it all right in my broken Mandarin. Picture menus always helped a lot choosing the right dishes. But we got it all wrong in this one Dim Sum restaurant with its really small pictures on the menu. My mom asked for fish head soup what I could order back and in the meantime my dad picked China’s famous chicken feet from the menu – what I missed out. You can imagine how big our eyes have been when the waitress served this delicates. Anyways it’s all part of the experience to try new things and that’s what made us actually try them. And to be honest they weren’t as bad as their reputation is among other travelers.
But where did we all go and what did we see? To keep it short we traveled along the East Coast from Hong Kong via Shanghai to Beijing and the Great Wall, stopped in Xi’an and the Terracotta Army, took a boat through the Three Gorges where we saw China’s and the world’s biggest dam, went to Dali and Lijiang to hike the beautiful Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan, and finished off with a river cruise on flooded Li River in Guangxi. After four weeks in China you flew out of Hong Kong going to Sydney, Australia.
Photos: Click here to check out my photos (East coast, China)
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