Actual vacation

My last 10 days on the road are more backpacking like I used to before I had friends I could visit in other cities. I think I mentioned before how annoying I find it to just hop from one sight to another, so I restricted myself to one Chinese province. I chose Guangxi for two reasons, first because it was close enough to Hongkong to not fly there and second because it has beach and warm temperatures even in February. When I was younger I really liked winter in Germany, but in the meantime I realized how much more pleasant tropical climate is. Maybe winters were really colder back then so that you’d have some beautiful snowscapes instead of the grisly, grey, depression-inducing mess that is Berlin from November until March.

My first station from Hongkong wasn’t in Guangxi yet, but just across the border from Hong Kong. Shenzhen, a fishing village 40 years ago, now a city of more than 10 million and the world’s manufacturing hub for IT hardware, is just a metro ride from Hong Kong’s centre. What it lacks in history it makes up with its high standard of living. It’s quite green and friendlier than most Chinese megacities feel. I only had an afternoon there, which I spent in a converted warehouse area (that might as well be located in London or Berlin) and my favorite corny tourist attraction so far, 世界之窗 or “Windows of the World”. That’s a theme park that has replica of hundreds of famous buildings and monuments in different scales, with the center being a 70 or so meter high Eiffel tower. But there’s also the Statue of Liberty, the Cologne Dom, Tower bridge and so on. It also has a dinosaur section and a bar area that is built in the style of a typical “European” inner city, including a church, cobble stones and authentic ancient-looking street lanterns. As my architect co-scholar said after seeing a replica of a church in a shopping mall with a big LCD-screen instead of an altar: “Die scheißen sich nix”, which is a friendly way of saying they don’t give a shit. I like that. The ingenuousness with which things that appeal are simply copied. It really is a sign of respect and admiration. Chinese like Europe and especially Germany for its architecture, lifestyle and nature. It’s just that sometimes they idealize and disparage it at the same time as a romantic, cute, old-fashioned thing from past, more of a display in a museum than an actual place with actual people living their lives there.

Also note the two towers of the world trade center in thiss model of New
York that looks like the city has been abandoned for a century

The next stop after Shenzhen for me was Beihai, a rather small city (1,5 million inhabitants) at the southern coastline of Guangxi, not very far from the border to Vietnam. Tourist sights are rare, but the weather was perfect, my hotel had a pool and was next to the beach and I needed some time to work and study anyways. I liked it so much that in fact, after checking the weather forecast for Guilin (8 degrees, rain), I decided to stay four days until the 17^th. For one night however, I took the ferry to Weizhou Island (涠洲岛), a rock formed by volcanic activity about 40km off the coast. Just a few years ago, it was barely known and a hidden gem, but with more and more Chinese tourists able to afford trips to the south, the tourism industry discovered the place and relentlessly developed it. I can see why many expats in China take the next flight out of the country if they want to go on vacation. Travelling in China can be fun, interesting, entertaining, but it can’t be relaxing. Unless you’re willing to explore very far off the beaten track, you’ll always have crowds of Chinese around you, with a surprising number of noisy children, given that the birthrate here is not a lot higher than in Germany. Along with the tourism come its unsavory side effects: Touts and charges for everything. It’s great that an otherwise underdeveloped island gets the chance to develop a local economy, but being treated like a money fountain that has to be squeezed as hard as possible just doesn’t leave you with pleasant experiences (and it wasn’t cause I was the only white person around, Chinese tourists were treated with impartial greed). I managed to have fun nonetheless, meeting some young Chinese who showed me how to properly arrange a seafood dinner (go to the market with the fresh catch, haggle hard (don’t be white), go to the restaurant, haggle hard, get fresh oysters for 40ct/piece) and showed me the island on scooters. I also went jetskiing by myself. It’s exactly the type of blowhard, adrenaline activity you’d think it be and hella fun. After another night in tropical Beihai, I’m now on the way north, slowly moving towards the cold reality of Beijing in February.

So chill and full of nice cafés and bars

You can have your (Chinese) written with Caramel. Taste is so-so,
but a great shot for your instagam collection.