Chinese National Holiday

The Chinese National Holiday is traditionally the first week in October. However this year the National Holiday was limited to a day, later to be stretched back into a week in fear of a slowing economy. Fortunately I get to reap the benefits of this week long holiday with a semi-vacation/tour of China. Initially I had planned on traveling to Thailand during this holiday because a week long this is China’s busiest travel holiday next to Chinese New Year. But his plan quickly died because I only have a single entry Visa due to the Olympics and getting a re-entry visa is 太贵了 (very expensive). After some debating on which destination we wanted to see the most in China, we decided on Yunan Province. Yunan is the most south-western province besides Tibet and is home to the Tiger leaping gorge, which is the largest gorge in the world. This was a great plan until we looked up flights and saw that they cost about $450 round-trip, which is out of our budget.
That’s when we landed on plan C, Shanghai. We booked a flight leaving for Shanghai on Sat. Sept. 27th and returning on Fri. Oct. 3rd. I had originally anticipated on going to Shanghai later on during the trip when we have a 5 day weekend, but we are going to swap that with the Yunan trip instead and see if we can catch a cheaper flight. Shanghai is an amazingly westernized place for mainland China. The business district is the Chinese equivalent to Manhattan and with the geographic location of Georgia. There skyline is called the “bund” and rivals and other in China. Shanghai also has the Yellow Mountain where I think a group of us are going to hike and camp for a night, and a river town that is the Chinese version of Venice. We don’t know which order we are going to travel in but we do have Serena, a Chinese friend that we made during the Olympics. Serena lives in Shanghai and is an excellent tour guide and already said that we would show us around.
On a side note Beijing is starting to cool down. It is very noticeable that October is around the corner and the smell of fall is in the air. But I have heard that the 天气 (weather) in Shanghai is warm and on some days hot.
I think after this trip I am going to take a break and traveling within Beijing again. From the beginning of school on Aug. 26th I haven’t stayed in Beijing more than 6 consecutive nights without traveling to another Province.