I know! You are going to say that I have this fixation on China, and you will remember that I had written about that great country few blogs ago. At last I came here to see for myself, unfortunately it is not a leisure trip, it is business where we are going to meet universities and agents to seek future partnership, however, what I saw baffled me. Same as I mentioned about Portugal, the country is ripe for tourists. It has all the things a tourist wants to see; Food, shops, malls, good hotels, cleanliness, smiley faces, safety, and last but not least great culture. The prices are similar to those in Dubai, so it is not as cheap as people may think it is, but in terms of value for money, the country has a lot to offer. I went for a massage already, and had Thai food, in a good restaurant based in a nice mall called Coastal mall in Shenzhen.
My son, who is more excited than me, and I wish my daughter was able to join too but she didn’t get her visa on time, will be upset if I do not talk about the stuff we saw in less than 24 hours. We landed in Hong Kong airport, and after few escalators down and up, and a nice ride on the airport train (these seems to be popular these days as I had rides in airport trains in Miami, Spain and New York) we reached the main airport, waited for the Ferry tickets kiosk to open to be transferred to mainland China. While waiting for the Ferry, we had breakfast at the airport, and did some emails (of course), and then we did some duty free shopping. The best was the massage oils available at the airport, sold by authentic Chinese women. iI am going to open one of the jars and rub myself before I go to sleep (oops, its already 2:38 am).
Prior to going on the ferry, there was another ferry train, this time it was hilarious, as the train was so fast, we thought that part of Walt Disney had started at the airport, the railway was well lit and turns right and left, then stops then starts again, in a speed similar to those bullet trains. Lovely though, I haven’t been on a roller coaster since I was 17, so this was a good reminder. My son and I both thought at the same time, that airports should have fun stuff like this so people do not get bored; as it is so boring just to see perfumes, creams and chocolates. One wants to see things that are not there in other places. But, who am I to complain, I have my imaginations of course with thoughts about crazy stuff lingering in my mind till the journey ends.
The Ferry was also nice, I didn’t get see sick this time; there were many little islands on the way, one of them had something like a mosque on top of the mountain, Jihad and I were thinking of going to the top to be able to take a good photo of it, we realized later that the ferry was fully indoors, so I went to sleep instead, oh, did I mention that the plane trip was terrible, we were both squeezed so much to the extent that we couldn’t sleep, the guy in front of me had his chair fully reclined and he laterally slept on my lap the whole night. Terrible I must say that they still build airplanes like this! As every time I got up to get something from my bag, I would touch his forehead or pull his hair (by mistake of course)and he would wake up and gives me that mean look, scary!!
We Googled and read few stuff about Shenzhen prior to leaving Dubai, we were told that we should wear face masks, and never rinse our mouths with the tap water? I felt that I will go to a place that is not so clean? But once we started the drive to the hotel, all our bad thoughts were sent as a curse to those silly writers. I hate the media, it tells the wrong story, and makes people wary from visiting new places. Seeing is believing is my new motto. I am calling myself world traveler (i filled one of those online forms, that asked me to choose a profile, it had few descriptions and one of them was world traveler which I liked, so this is going to be stuck on me like Johnson's plaster, and you will have to put up with me while I describe to you my real thoughts while traveling!
Ok, everything is over sized here, of course so the 1.3 billion people are fed and sheltered; one of the buildings was so huge, I thought that the whole of Dubai people can fit in it, which will be nice, so at least we will know our neighbors for a change. The malls also are huge, and the variety of stuff sold is amazing. I just returned from a trip to London and Portugal, I didn’t see half the international shops that have their stuff on display, which brings me back to my question, why are the Arabs stuck in London?
Think and give me an answer please.
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