After two overnight sleeper trains, four days in Shandong province, a day in Shanghai, six hours in Pudong airport and three hours in bus, I’m pretty much too tired to write any sort of coherent blog entry. But since I’m leaving for Yunnan province tomorrow and will be crashing around the Southwest for several weeks, I figured any entry was better than nothing, literary masterpiece or not.
I was going to write up some detailed comparison between Hangzhou and Zibo, firing up the great “North vs. South” debate that expats seem to love. Instead, due to my fatigue (and unfinished packing, yikes), I’m thinking I’ll just post some pictures instead. Needless to say, my trip back to Shandong threw me back into the China I first experienced, bringing back memories (and smells) that my time in Hangzhou, with it’s southern coastal glitz and numerous Starbucks, has been busing burying. I must admit that life in the capital of Zhejiang province is much more comfortable and cosmopolitan, but in the end Zibo is probably a better window on what is truly going on in this country. That little ol’ industrial town is China unleashed. It exposes bare many of the serious problems this country is facing, but its genuine friendliness is quite the relief from some of the nouveau riche snobbery encountered in the bigger, “everything is fine and getting better” urban centers.
So that’s all for now, the detailed comparison will have to wait for a while (don’t worry, I’m working on it in my mind).