run rabbit run

The question is what did I make of the motherland? In three simple words, I loved it.

The food was amazing, Beijing was a mixture of modernity and history, it has the pomp of a Communist capital, but the rare peaceful moment. Shanghai hasn't changed since the days of concessions except the buildings are much taller and the money goes into Chinese pockets now. Hangzhou is achingly beautiful, a tourist city which is surprisingly quiet. Wuzhen a mixture of typical poor countryside with one of the most beautiful places on earth.

It met a lot of my expectations, it broke a few others.

The little amounts of freedom taken away, it isn't anything like the West would have you believe, the police aren't hustling you from the moment you wake up. After living in Germany for nearly a year, I get the feeling its actually worse in a lot of cases in the West. The great firewall is more a pain less a way of censoring free speech (I direct people to fu ce ma). Police presence is everywhere, but I don't have the oppressive feeling I get whenever I see the polizei pulling up in Munich.

The poor are as poor as I imagined, there are ghettos in China, but there are favella in Brazil, there are the slums in South Africa, there are the council estates in South London. In reality I don't see how any of these places differ, crime rates high. Walking back from east side of Wuzhen I wasn't sure if we were going to get kidnapped, robbed of our stuff and then thrown into a pit to be buried. I've seen story lines in Chinese TV shows where things like this have happened, you take that with a pinch of salt, but when the local host tells me not to speak any English you have to wonder. My girlfriend was pretty aghast at these kinds of places, she even said she hated where she grew up in a Hutong in the north of Beijing. I suppose with my western eyes and keen camera skills I found it a bit romantic, being close to the locals which is something missing in the red brick estates all over the UK. Her question to me was 'what chance do these people have? They have no chance at a good education, I was lucky'. I didn't give an answer but thought about South London for a few minutes and the Dizee Rascal song World Outside.

On the flipside there is extreme wealth which I think is justifiable, Alan always says we shouldn't look at the past and take too much into account of what our fore fathers did, but after more than 100 years of foreign occupation and the stealing of Chinese wealth, it's only fair that the Bund in Shanghai is now faced by Pudong making more money than all the colonial powers did. This is the economic miracle of China itself, the British through trial and error found if the Chinese if left to their own devices in a free market economy, would chase every dollar as if it was water to man lost in a desert. Although this leads to the pressure you get when you want to browse a store, from both ends its the same, in Xidan on the north side of the road there is a massive expensive modern shopping malls selling designer brands and south side there are massive cheap shopping malls selling fake stuff. In both places you get pressurised into spending money, in the north the assistant followed us around the store until we walked out in disgust, in the south one assistant saw us looking and bargained against himself so we would buy something, while another said it costs this but if you want it I can make it cheaper.

It's been a long article, but take away the food, the photo ops, seeing the places in person, the chance to meet my girlfriends family, the holiday has been a chaotic place for me to learn something new and try to dispel a lot of misconceptions.

In a sentence, it was amazing my beautiful eggs.