任是无情也动人

(Note to self: need a cutesy Shanghai Expo icon to match the Beijing Olympics one...)

Usually, when I travel to China, it's to visit relatives and maybe do a bit of shopping on the side. Thus, I usually only see Shanghai overnight, and then only the inside of shops, before I take the train to Nanjing and basically spend most of my time indoors at home. On this trip, however, I traveled with my aunt and uncle, who are very fond of bombarding our tour guides and any fellow tour-goers who are unfortunate enough to fall into conversation with them with millions of questions about the state of...everything. Thus, I am left with a much more detailed and wide perspective of my motherland.

( Beijing: )

( Shanghai: )

( Pingyao: )

( Xi'an: )

Although our vacation in China isn't wholly over yet, the guided portions of it are. So I thought I'd write a bit about the various tour guides we've had on this journey while they're fresh on my mind, especially since they've been the topic of much discussion among my aunt, uncle, and cousins.

Let's start in order with Shanghai. Although we only had one (and a half if you count the trips from the airport and to the airport) day of guided tour with Kathy, my memories of her were generally ok. She did what a tour guide was supposed to do. Her tour of the French Concession area showed that she knew the area and its history well, and could communicate such just fine with English. Overall, our impressions of her were fair, though not spectacular.

Next was Jessie from Xi'an, who was by far the favorite of the twins and the rest of us. She gave me the impression of a peer much more than Kathy did, though our ages are all about the same, and she could certainly relate to children the best. When the girls joked around about the mistranslations on one of the museums near Yongtai's tomb, Jessie was able to laugh and contribute to the joke. She was also the most loquacious of our guides. On the car trips to/from our tour spots, and even during the tour, she would engage in long and deep conversations with my uncle about every topic under the sun - politics, religion, economy, history, China's place in the world and in the eyes of the people. She wasn't afraid to give her own opinions of everything, and it was very obvious that she loved learning and was a very wide-read scholar as well as well-traveled young lady. She also went above and beyond to accompany us through my aunt's very serious and detailed examinations of every item in a museum even though she must have been walking her feet off much as we had felt the first two Expo days. In fact, even after we left Xi'an, the twins kept comparing the following two tour guides against her and found them wanting. Well, I have to agree...

In Pingyao, our guide was a young man named George. Coming from a much smaller and poorer town, it came as no surprise that his English was not as good as our previous two guides. There were several times where I had to play translator myself between my uncle and our guide. However, he was pretty honest about when he didn't understand something we said. He also put the extra little effort to finding us good restaurants for dinner in the two days we spent there, even though dinner was not included in the tour arrangement we'd originally paid for. My uncle figured that he probably got a kickback from those diners. He was also the only tour guide to actually join us for lunch without a separate receipt (meaning the tour agency paid for his part of lunch too, which is technically against regulations). But since we were happy to find decent (and sanitary!) eateries in such a small town like Pingyao that we really didn't mind the small perks he got out of things. The man did give a general impression of earnestness...

Finally, that brings us to our last tour guide in Beijing, Selena - she who has been the topic of many a dinner conversation. At first impression, she seemed to be very fluent in English and had a pretty impressive resume (lived in Vancouver a few years; lead tours to or in foreign countries). However, the more time we spent on her tours, the more it seemed like...she really isn't suited to her job. Even ignoring the incident at the Forbidden City, and her attempts at talking my aunt to changing her tour program from Mutianyu and Suzhou Street... there are the small things. She would very often lapse into Chinese whenever she wanted to get a point across quickly, despite repeated reminders that we all spoke English as our primary language. She usually addressed only my aunt (half in Chinese), even if it had been my uncle who'd asked the question - as if she expected my aunt to do the translation to the rest of us for her. She hardly spoke a word to the twins and when she spoke to me, it's as if to a high-schooler on a homework assignment rather than an adult vacationing on her own time and money. As well, she would often say that she'd wait for us at such and such a spot for us to be done with taking photos or visiting Such-and-such Hall or climbing a nearby hill to see what was there. She also had a tendency to get picked up in the morning by the driver after we were picked up first, and get dropped off before we were dropped off at our hotel. These are things none of our previous guides had done; they'd always accompanied us no matter where we were dragging them, and saw us from/to our hotel from beginning to end. It just didn't seem quite professional here, since, well, just who's paying for who's time?

I've overheard various other small tour groups with only a few foreigners and an English-speaking tour guide. Most of them act more like Jessie (or Kathy) than like Selena. I guess we just had some bad luck with our last guide. Honestly, I think she'd do better at a desk job arranging schedules than in the field. Other than the last one, I think we had a pretty fair run of guides on the rest of our trip. Anyway, in the end, it's going to be our wallets talking when we do the tipping, and we already know what the math is going to be there.

But, in case anyone else ever thinks about ordering a tour from CTS for Shanghai, Xi'an, Beijing, or with CITS for Pingyao, hopefully this will help you make decisions or know who to request/avoid. :)

Started off this morning at the Pingyao city walls, supposedly dating back to Ming Dynasty. While there, we bought gloves from the local vendor cuz it was kinda chilly up there. I was wearing three layers (including a sweater), so it was just the fingers and toes freezing stiff.

Following that was a visit to the local temple to Confucius, one of the oldest of such temples still in existence - it was built originally during Han and then rebuilt during the Jin Dynasty. My uncle joked that the twins will need to make a prayer there for blessings on getting into MIT; I noted that I was glad to be done with the whole school thing (though I guess I could have used some luck/blessing in passing my CCIE lab exam/certification, I guess). While there, my aunt had a...um...slight 'incident' at the toilets, which required us to rush through the rest of that site and then make a stop back to the hotel.

According to our tour guide, Shanxi (山西) province is actually predominantly Daoist, which I found surprising since I'd thought that Daoism wasn't that seriously practiced as a religion anymore in favor of atheism and Buddhism. I did note the signs saying there was a local temple to Erlang Shen though, and of course, being the fangirl that I am, I requested to see it tomorrow morning before we leave for Beijing. Tee.

After lunch, we took a car to the Wang Family Compound, which while was not as famous as the Qiao family, was much larger. We spent pretty much 2.5 hours walking through the place. It was *big*! I agree with the comparison that it was like visiting one of those old castles in England. The place was built like a fortress, except also prettier, and according to the various Chinese tours I overheard, practically all the carvings on the floors, eaves, columns, etc. had some symbolic meaning or other. The compound was built against a mountain, so the top/north wall could overlook everything. There was also a huge crane there, ostensibly in the construction of a new 5-star hotel that will be connected to the compound. I guess we know what Pingyao's (neighboring town's) development plans are. :P

Tomorrow we hit a few more spots nearby before heading back to civilization (Beijing). :)