China/Japan June 5-29, 2000 Home Page Itinerary Photo Album Contact Us	“China is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she awakes, she will astonish the world.” - Napoleon Well, China is awakening and the results are impressive. Stay tuned, as it will be hard to recognize the place ten years from now. For a detailed look at our itinerary through China, click here. We started our trip in Hong Kong where we joined our tour group of twenty people including Warren’s sister, Jennifer. Our first stop on the mainland was Guilin where we took a day-long riverboat cruise on the Li River. The scenery, rife with gumdrop-shaped mountains and fog aplenty, could have been right off a Chinese painting. Some of our most indelible impressions of China include: · Any day in urban China is like the Tour de France meets Manhattan! Bikes everywhere, riders jockeying for position, cars careening to narrowly avoid bikers and vice-versa, and riders clad in bright, racing colored rain ponchos. · Diapers appear to be non-existent in China. The highly-practical Chinese remedy? Anyone not wholly potty-trained has his/her pants slit entirely up the heinie seam. Whenever a parent either notes or is told that a child needs to go, they nonchalantly hoist the kid up (facing the parent) strategically position him/her over the curb and preferably above the gutter, kids’ knees immediately spring and maintain a 90* angle and the job is underway…. · Any Carol Burnett fans out there? Remember how one of her characters always wore the wide-banded pantyhose knee-highs with sandals and a short skirt? It’s a look that’s de rigeur in China. · On a more serious note, it’s been an amazing history and humanity lesson for us to read and learn first-hand accounts of the extremely widespread and devastating persecution suffered for several of China’s recent decades, of which the Cultural Revolution (1966-1972) was the most dramatic and cruel. The goal of the Cultural Revolution was to destroy all vestiges of how things had been. Anyone holding positions like all of us have held would likely have found our jobs dissolved, our homes looted, and our spouses and children separated and sent off to the countryside to do hard labor. We’ve enjoyed some really great books on the subject, including Life and Death in Shanghai and Wild Swans.
	China/Japan Pictures (click on each to enlarge)
	Hong Kong	Guilin	Snake Wine	Shanghai
	Shanghai Acrobatics	Three Gorges Dam	Pandas – Xian Zoo	Terracotta Warriors
	Tiannamen Square	The Great Wall	Sushi in Kyoto	Warren’s 34^th in Tokyo