China and its development in tourism

I went to Guangdon and Guangxi provinces in China for a week with my mom's crazy cousin. He is 71, learned to drive in his 60's, but drives his car all around crazy Chinese traffic and travels around the world without speaking English. It must have to do with his musical background that makes his mind stay sharp.

He's also a great tour guide and knows a lot of history about places and likes to be spontaneous when travelling and takes his time to explore. So I went on a trip with him, his wife and my aunt.

I went to Huzhou, Yangshou and other places. The karst scenery is pretty cool, but what struck me most is the "preparation" of these places for massive Western tourism. These places are already pretty touristy, but my mom's cousin and his wife were in Huzhou just 2 years ago and they say it's changed a lot.

I stared into the coffeeshops and hostels in Huzhou, with their signs all tacked in English and thought, "Where did this come from?" Last time I was in this part of China, I remember a bunch of kids coming up to us at night and asking for money. There was nothing like that this time. Now accommodation is equipped with wi-fi and owners are hiring people from France to westernize the hostel.

Or maybe it was all here before.

Bamboo and its uses

When I was in Budapest and I told some person I was going to Hong Kong, he said he'd never been but he knew that the scaffolding that you usually see as steel is made out of bamboo. Tough stuff, that bamboo.

And it's better than steel because it's floatable - in China it's now a tourist industry to float down rafts but for centuries fisherman and others used rafts made of bamboo as a primary mode of transport.

And it's better than wood because it's edible - different types of bamboo can be boiled as part of a soup, and it can be eaten as a snack in its entirety (chew to get the juice and then spit out the fibers), and its shoots can be eaten as part of a meal.

If anyone can name me a more versatile type of plant, let me know.

Signage

I'm in Hong Kong now. Not much to say about Hong Kong; I've seen it all before. I guess it's the invisible stuff - the air molecules - that has gotten to me this time.

But I have noticed one thing and it's that HK seems to have more signs in its city than other places where I've been. In the toilet alone, they must have at least 20 signs: please open door slowly, please be careful of the opening door, floor is slippery, please dry hands, please use hand dryer, please flush toilet etc. They also have instruction signs that in other countries would be unwritten because it'd be common knowledge or common sense, like how to go up an escalator (hold handrail. stand still)

These extra signs that make the city seem quirky probably have their reason in a) dealing with a large population of people b) legal reasons when dealing with a large population of people.

Flowers and Castles

March 8 was one of the first days I was in Budapest. All around town I saw men carrying flowers. At first I didn't really notice it until I saw more and more and more men carrying flowers and then I wondered if it was Hungarian Valentine's day or something. Later I pointed this out to someone else and they told me it's International Women's Day and it is tradition to give a flower to women (or I guess a particular woman) on this day. Wow! Not even people who celebrate Valentine's day give flowers like this on this scale anymore.

So I went on some obscure 2-hour bus trip trying to look for Janos Hill. In the end I didn't find it but I did see another tourist suffer because of the same bus route. So I got on 22, and as the tourist got on the bus he asked a local woman, "This goes to Buda Castle?" "Yes, Buda Castle," she nodded. Already I was wary because this bus went the opposite direction from the castle but I didn't know where I'm going myself so I didn't say anything. In any case, after 30 minutes, far from the castle, the tourist finally figured out that this is NOT the way to the castle and he started freaking out saying, "Please, please, take me to the castle! I want to go to the castle!" I then passed a street sign that said: Buda Keszi and I guess that BudaCastle said with an accent sounds exactly like Buda Keszi. So that local woman wasn't wrong; we were going to some version of Buda Castle...

Horse Race - Reality

I am travelling very quickly through the rest of my itinerary in Europe. Within the last week I have been to Strasbourg, a small village in France, Geneva, a small suburb of Geneva, Zürich, and Graz. And then I will finish off with Vienna and Budapest.

As a kid I dreamed of travelling to Italy, really only Italy, I didn't care about any other place in Europe. The first time I came to Europe I remember snapping pictures right and left. I only went to Germany and The Netherlands then. Everything was so different from North America! Then I got really interested in Germany. And the second time I visited London and Paris, huge megatroplises I took my time in each. That was good. This time, on the tour, I have visited both small villages and huge cities and I must say out of all of them I prefer the smaller places to places like Rome or even Berlin. Rome was beautiful but it didn't feel very liveable. The places I most enjoyed were like Strasbourg, Graz, Thessaloniki and Ljubljana...they could be metropolitan but they were also human-sized. So even though I am looking forward to Vienna and Budapest, I will be saying goodbye to the new discovery of small cities in Europe for now.

I also am excited because I bought the Lonely Planet Hong Kong and Macau book! Each time I go to Hong Kong I know more and more about the city and its people and this time I am hoping this book will help because although my relatives can tell me things, I need to discover it for myself and also reinforce my knowledge with reading in English.