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Falling in love with China

By Rhys Williams (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2011-05-30 09:30
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Visiting the Memorial Hall was the most sobering experience I've had and I think ever will have. The entire facility paid the most sincere homage to the 300,000 victims of the Nanjing Massacre as possible. For me, it put into context the transformation China has undergone through the last one hundred years, from dynasty in 1911, to country under siege in 1937, to rising world superpower in 2011 - what a feat.

In the following days, we visited a factory in Huaxi - the number one village in China. The family which owned the factory gave us a grand tour of their village, showing us both their local cuisine which included freshwater prawns and eels and their newly made replica Great Wall which rolled over the village's nearby hillsides.

Continuing to Nantong we joined in on the festivities of China's National Day on October 1st by hiring electric powered boats to race each other in while locals released lanterns which then floated over our heads and created rich orange and red reflections on the Nantong Hao river, with every day in China as exhilarating as the other we concluded the evening in the way any modern Chinese hipsters would do - by hiring a room for the three at Nantong's KTV Karaoke building.

The Business trip came to an end with a few final days in Shanghai with our local Shanghainese tour guides, Jonny and Wangda that my father and Kyle had befriended from their earlier trip as they assisted us with anything and everything from finding good clothes markets and restaurants to finding a good, cheap, local dry cleaner.

I returned home feeling ecstatic from my trip to China to complete my end of year examinations which included Mandarin. I completed my final year of high school with strong scores for the written Mandarin examination and I received a near perfect score for my oral Mandarin examination thanks to all the practice I'd had during the trip.

I decided to use 2011 as a gap in order to ground myself as an individual but also as it allowed me to be available for my third short commute to China, which I made in February. This time, as my father was busy with business in Adelaide he left my brother and me to finalise an order we had made to a factory in Hangzhou.

For the third time in a three year period I had entered China, I joked to my brother that it was starting to feel a bit like a routine, but the truth is, I think that no matter how often I travel to China the contented feeling I get by arriving in a place I am so fond of will prevent it from ever getting old. We landed in Shanghai on a bitterly cold winter evening of zero degrees Celsius - far beyond any possible minimum temperature in Adelaide. We checked in to our hotel and met with our Shanghainese friends Jonny and Wangda to have a relaxed dinner with and our now customary tradition upon arriving in China - receiving a Shanghai foot massage to die before calling an end to a long day of traveling.

Due to this trip only consisting of my brother, Kyle (24 years) and myself (18 years), the trip took a much younger and playful angle then my previous times. Over the first few business free days we spent the days shopping and sightseeing around popular sites such as the People's Square, the Bund, and Nanjing Road while at night we frequented cocktail lounges such as the Hyatt on the Bund's Vue Bar and Shanghai's top nightclub Rich Baby.

We began business proceedings with a trip on the fast train from Shanghai's modern Hongqiao station to Hangzhou where we travelled to a local factory where we checked the factory's procedures, the details of our orders and their shipment arrangements before. Upon finalisation we had a nice customary lunch with the factory managers and liaisons before making our way back to Shanghai by train.

The next day we had arranged to travel to Nantong again to meet with our shipping agent and discuss the prospect of joint venture business proceedings, but as some may know, without the convenience of a private car traveling to Nantong from Shanghai can be somewhat inconvenient as there is no direct train route and the coaches which travel between the two are often quite congested. Kyle and I decided to spend the extra money to hire a Shanghai Expo taxi one way and the hotels' private minivan to transport ourselves and our again, bloated suitcases to and from Nantong. On both occasions the drivers were only too happy to make a pit stop for us to buy both them and ourselves McDonalds and KFC for the novelty factor.

During our final three days in Shanghai I decided it would be nice to see the Shanghai Acrobats and the Shanghai Globe Theatre, which was a brilliant idea as it was brilliant. We also decided to shout an evening for Jonny and Wangda, Jonny's wife, Jonny's son and Wangda's daughter on an upmarket Bund River cruise where we could enjoy the beautiful lights and skyline of Shanghai while on the Bund. On our penultimate day In China, my final activity idea was for Kyle, Jonny, Wangda, their kids and myself to travel by subway to Happy Valley Theme park in Shenzhen. This was by far, the best Theme park I have ever been to with rollercoasters far more intense and modern than any other rollercoaster in Australia, I'm still not sure if Jonny and Wangda will ever recover from them, I'll have to ask them next time I go to China!

Now, back in Adelaide I am missing China but hoping to spend a few months traveling through China closer to the end of the year before starting University at the University of Adelaide in February 2012. I plan to study a Bachelor of Media and a Bachelor of International Studies with a focus on topics such as Asian Studies whilst also gaining a Diploma in Languages (Mandarin). It is my hope to study in China during my second year and eventually become a China Correspondent/Journalist for Western News Resources. My fascination with China continues to grow, and so it should – it's a wonderful place.

The author,18 years old, is from Adelaide, Australia.

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