Arriving in China

Coming from the United States, even on an exceptionally good itinerary, the traveler has been on the road for hours, and is likely to have lost some sleep somewhere along the way.  This trip was my first to China and my third to Asia, so the cultural shock was still quite real, even if I had been 100% rested, which I was not.

The elements of culture shock for me included things that I had experience before and things that were new.  The language barrier is often there--I am not a multi-lingual polyglot and I like to travel so that is almost a given.  I expected to have trouble with the characters, but amazingly almost all signs that had a government connection to them were also in English.  So getting to the bathroom was never an issue--what you would find there is another story.  For some reason I find the squatting toilet to be a challenge.  The second thing is that I became an instant ethnic minority.  By far the most common tourist in China is Han Chinese.  They out number those of European origins by a long, long shot, and so even in the airport I stood out.  But the thing that surprised me the mist was that you had to pass through a temperature sensor to enter the country.  Big brother is literally watching.

I had booked my tour through a Chinese company and was a bit trepidatious about whether I would be met at all.  I had crowd sourced my choice, and in the past that has been a very good strategies--no surprises--you are apprised of the good, the bad, and the ugly, and you make a choice with your eyes wide open.  But there she was, right outside of customs, and we started our tour of one of the oldest civilizations on the planet.