Trayle

A few years ago I travelled to China to visit a friend. She was staying in Shanghai, but first I started in Beijing.

I was staying at a wonderful old wooden hotel with a courtyard, near the Forbidden City. This complex of palaces is a city within a city and well worth a visit. Next to the Forbidden City is Tiananmen Square, the place where Mao attended military parades and where student's protests were brutally suppressed in 1989. Mao's corpse can still be seen at his mausoleum.

Other amazing sites in Beijing are the Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven.

 After Beijing I travelled to Xi'an, famous for its excavation of a huge army of terracotta statues, portraying soldiers, archers, generals, horses; everything the Emperor expected to need in his afterlife.

Another 14-hour trainride brought me to Shanghai, an attractive city that is modernizing at an incredible rate.

I've visited some museums and finally met Ling who showed me around and introduced me to 'hotpot' a Chinese dish where you boil all your food in a large bowl of water and drink it afterwards as after dinner soup.

 I made a wonderful daytrip to Zhouzhuang
, a very nice authentic-looking town with canals, old wooden houses and lots of red lanterns.

The whole trip ended in Hong Kong, a city with quite a western atmosphere, with impressive highrises and expensive shops and restaurants. Not as charming as Beijing or exciting as Shanghai, but a worthy final destination of a magnificent trip!