8 days in China

I just came back this morning from China, where I spent 8 days with my parents and brothers. I got so many things to talk about so I'll try to keep things organized, I'll do my best to not forget something :)

So first I'll talk about my trip itself, Shanghai, then Beijing, and all the amazing things that I've seen and experienced there.

Days 1 to 4 : Shanghai

I arrived from Seoul int'l airport to Shanghai and I was really surprised by what I felt there. This was actually everything EXCEPT a chinese city ! I expected lots of chinese people and lots of (like in Seoul) big residential buildings, lots of restaurants, little streets, I don't know how to explain what happened then but that was so weird ! 

My hotel was near the Bund (an area in Shanghai which refers to the buildings and the wharves on the Huangpu River, facing Pudong and its futurist buildings - I'll talk about that later anyway - ). And this Bund is actually mainly (ONLY) composed of european style buildings. I mean, you can be walking and visiting a european city it will be the same, you would not see any difference (ok, obviously except all that chinese people talking soooo loudly and hustling you all the time).

So, as mentioned before, Pudong is facing the Bund. Shanghai is supposed to be the face of China, so it's supposed to reflect the magnitude, the power, the modernity of China. On the picture below you can see the main buildings of Pudong (the higher ones), from the left to the right, the Orient pearl, then the JinMao Tower and finally the opener

     

But, constrasting to this apparent mordernity, some old places still reflect the real chinese architecture and way of life, such as for instance the Yu Garden, not quite quiet and calm (always because of these noisy chinese tourists)

 The temple of Jade also reflects the real chinese architecture (or at least the one I expected to see in China)  and the remnants of the Confucian or religious era .

 

Days 4 to 8 : Beijing

Going to Beijing was the funniest thing of all the trip, because when you first go on the Tian'anmen Place, you just dive into your high school history book concerning communism. Everything looks so unreal : so many red flags with gold stars, so many cameras which are watching you , so many guards, so many civil guards (who actually look like bad spies in movies with their sunglasses, their black suit ant their walkie-talkie). 

 

In Beijing, almost everything is enormous : the distances, the streets, the historical sites, take the example above : the Tian'anmen place, which is just the biggest place in the world.

Also, the pictures below are from the Forbidden City. It was first called "forbidden" because no one except the emperor, his family, the court and the employees (from 1 000 to 20 000, depending of the needs of the court) was allowed to go in. Some numbers can maybe help you to figure it out how huge the palace is : 980 buildings, more than 8 000 thousands bedrooms, 200 years to be built, 52 meters wide moats, walls all around between 8 and 12 meters high.

The Great Wall was also quite impressive, not only because it's one of the 7 wonders of the world but also because you now know you're just such a little thing compared to that wall which used to cover 8 000 km of borders between China and Mongolia. Actually it was build to protect China from a possible invasion by the Mongols, but such as the Maginot line in France, invaders never came by this way, they always bypassed it. So, to recap it takes like at least 1 800 years to build and millions of workers dead from exhaustion and it appears to be completely useless (except for tourism obviously :) )

The summer Palace was the second home of the emperor during the Ming dynasty, like everything, the palace and the gardens around are enormous but still so beautiful !
Also, I couldn't stop taking pictures of the paintings on the ceiling beams, there were so aesthetic, and the  colors matched together were just literally AWESOME !

The temple of heaven was STILL ANOTHER home for the emperor under the Ming Dynasty, actually he was going there to pray heaven for good harvest. I was told that when the emperor was coming, all the people living on the Forbidden city-Temple of heaven axis were put somewhere else in order to let the emperor spirit as pure as possible (not in contact with the dirty spirits of Beijing inhabitants)

Then, I visited the Beijing Olympic Park on the last day, nothing special to say, but the architecture of the main complexes were really impressive.