OurChinaTravels.com

Our adventure in China has begun!

As you likely heard, with this blog we will be keeping an online chronicle of our 4-week trip to China - in Shanghai, Hangzhou and Wenzhou. As a father-and-sons effort, my two sons and I will be writing, editing, and photographing our way through China and sharing our images, impressions and perspectives with you - our welcome visitors. In the process I plan on leaping into the blogosphere, so to speak - so that after our return home to Seattle Washington I may introduce and facilitate my Internet Marketing clients through blog-related technologies and initiatives for their businesses.

Our initial voyage - via bus from Seattle to Vancouver BC and flight from Vancouver to Shanghai - went very well, thanks to some excellent planning by my wife Cindy. She has organized and is leading this trip through the University of Washington’s Exploration Seminar program, whereby students are given the opportunity to take a 4-week in-country course on some topic - ours being an exploration of the “Entrepreneurial Explosion in Modern China”. This course will, in Cindy’s words “give students a first-hand experience of the economic transformation currently taking place in China and an opportunity to understand and discuss the impact of China’s growth on the global economy”.

During our time here, Cindy and her 20 students will be doing background reading on the history and culture in China, going on local factory tours and visiting Chinese and American companies to hear first-hand from local Chinese entrepreneurs and U.S. business representatives who have outsourced to Chinese companies. I will be participating in some of these fascinating activities, but my main “job” will be two-fold - to enjoy introducing and exploring China with my two sons - Thomas age 11 and Lucas age 7- and to continue the Internet Marketing work I do for my clients - via laptop from behind The Great Chinese Firewall.

But I digress - back to our initial voyage in words and images…   Our bus trip and and our time in Canadian customs were uneventful, which is just the way we wanted it actually - since we were traveling on a group visa which essentially means an “all or none” scenario: one person not showing up on time could have derailed the trip for all of us.

At the Canadian border we all had to get off the bus, unload our luggage, and present our passports to Customs. 
It all happened to quickly I had to wonder whether they checked our bags.  At the airport, the first  time through I went through the Security metal detector I forgot I had my cell phone in my fanny pack and the alarm went off, so I was given extra attention – I had to remove my shoes and go through a rather intensive pat down with a body scanning wand, front and back. But they never opened and inspected my laptop. One student in our group had to have his laptop inspected, and he later joked that when the security person told him they wanted to do a body cavity search, he told them he had eaten Mexican the night before and that they didn’t want to go there…

 At the airpot while we were waiting for our flight, Thomas made friends with a large stuffed eagle at the entrance of a gift shop and started calculating how many Yuan he’d be able to get and spend from his weekly allowance.

 Lucas started making friends with several of the students, being his usual cute and friendly outgoing self. Lucas is also “our little wanderer” and our biggest concern on this trip – given his ability to wander off and disappear from sight, seemingly in the blink of an eye. I’ll have to keep my eyes wide open when we’re out in the crowds of Shanghai.
 

 During our 12 hour flight I read Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, her very personal account of life in China across three generations from 1909 to 1978, through the Civil War between the Communists and Kuomintang, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Thomas and Lucas were very well behaved on the flight, and were mostly occupied watching the in flight movie.

I found myself finishing the last chapter of this excellent book as our plane descended for our landing at Shanghai’s International airport.

 The Shanghai airport wasn’t crowded, and to my surprise our whole group moved through customs quickly with only a brief check of our group visa and passports - no body scan or search through anyone’s carry-on bags or checked baggage. 

At one point I attempted to take a photo of a customs officers in front of a “Nothing To Declare” sign, but he barked something in Chinese and shook his head to indicate to me that this was NOT a Kodak moment …    I sheepishly put my camera away and avoided any comment or eye contact with him, and I was able to pass through unchecked. 

So after a long voyage across the world, we had arrived in a place I knew we’d find to be a quite different and very interesting place – Shanghai, China…