We visited China recently, for family duty. These are my random touristy impressions of a couple of cities in a huge country I don’t know.
Although I understood very little Mandarin, I was ok because most of the places with lots of people had signs in both Mandarin and English. Announcements and the like were in the two languages — well, actually Mandarin and Chinglish. Chinglish is Chinese English, with (I presume) Mandarin grammar applied to English words. One gets used to this, the same happens with many languages in many places.
- zhengzhou
- tgv; announcements, good accent, crap grammar
- hotels, china vs us vs uk vs eu
- food, cuisine
- coffee
- cars, brands, driving, scooters, no crash helmets
- the presence of english
- cities of towers, the “dutch” countryside
- emergency vehicles wait
- architecture, too regular, not chaotic like life
- security theatre
- zhengzhou / tianjin / beijing
- the future