Spring Festival sucks because everything closes, all your friends go out of the country and there’s nothing to do. I can’t leave the country or I’ll invalidate my immigration paperwork. Where would you go if you were in China and had a couple of weeks? Not the usual Great Wall Terracotta warriors stuff, but the cool things people want to do but can’t. Maybe Red tourism? That’s a whole tourism category in China but it’s made for domestic audiences and is usually boring. Few artifacts, just lots of dioramas and photostats of old newspaper articles. More educational for CPC cadres. I’ve got the nationwide highspeed rail network at my command and enough money to keep me for the holiday. It’ll be crowded because everyone else is traveling too but it’s better than being stuck in my apartment. No beaches or sun, it’s winter and Sanya is overrun with Russians anyway.
I think there are more exciting red tourism activities being produced. Like I went to this live production portraying the railway guerrillas at the railway guerrilla museum/park in Zaozhuang. It was total action slop with pyrotechnics and stunts and stuff, but it was awesome lol
What’s zaozhuang? Got the characters for that?
枣庄
according to a rednote post i liked from “great china travel,” in january you should go to the Harbin ice festival, Mohe to experience a polar environment, Shenyang for the imperial palace, Changchun for skiing & history.
in february, they say sanya (which you already mentioned), haikou for a city on the sea, guangzhou flower markets, macau for casinos & portuguese flair, and zhuhai for romantic islands.
if it were me, i’d probably be drawn to
beijingedit meant to say Shanghai to see the cosmopolitan mashup (most western-accommodating area) and that seems to be where the main punk scene in china is. or i’d try to learn some gardening techniques.have fun
Tea tourism in Yunnan province. Menghai（勐海）and Yiwu（易武）have phenomenal teas in particular. Although it’s a bit early for the spring harvest, but you should see some tea leaves on branches and stuff and be able to drink so great stuff.
Go to Dandong or Changbai County and put your toes across the border to North Korea.
Taking the shangri-la high-speed rail to anywhere in Yunnan seems like it would be cool.
I thought Koryo Tours got shut down a number of years ago. I’ve always wanted to see the Broken Bridge. It was always cool transiting through Beijing airport and seeing the departures to Pyongyang.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
For old history stuff i would really go to Shanxi, especially places like Pingyao
I’ve always wanted to go
What’s in Pingyao? The problem with Chinese history is it’s SO big it’s a can of worms. People can, and do, spend their lives studying it and barely scratch the surface.
I would be doing so much food tourism.
Gotta represent my home province and say 张家界 tho idk what the weather is like this time of year
Maybe to you this is still Great Wall territory, but whenever I am in a country with a history of Buddhist practice, I like to go visit temples. I went to the Famen Temple near Xi’an which is supposed to be more touristy but I didn’t recognize a single other foreign tourist the whole time and everyone was staring at me. It was very cool. There’s a room with hundreds of golden plaques of the Buddha covering the ceiling.
You’ve gotta have dozens of temples that are way outside the cities and in the mountains and stuff that probably have cool architecture, cool history, and maybe even cool monks you can talk to and stay with for a day or two if it’s not super super busy. They definitely aren’t on vacation.
I get it if you don’t really care for that kind of thing though.
Eh, you seen one temple, you seen 'em all. Not worth spending a couple of days in another city for. Plenty in the countryside if I wanted to go, but they always put them on the top of hills so there are ten thousand stairs up.
where they have digged up this “ancient alien civilisation” thats waiting to be discovered by the chud archeology… “sanxingdui- culture”
or these cliche chinese mountains you think only exist in paintings but actually exist for real.
Edit: Tsingtao Brewery
Yanjin looks so neat though for real, there’s an entire large city with tower blocks cozily tucked away in a lush mountain valley
I hear Yunnan or Lhasa are nice places to visit.
Yunnan is amazing, Kunming is a great city but Dali is really beautiful if you want a smaller town
LOL, Dali used to be a hippie town. But some years back the commies cleared out all the dope smokers. It grows wild down there. I’m scared of Kuming. I went there once and it is too nice . The kind of place you doze off, wake up ten years later and wonder, “what happened?” You just know you had a very pleasant time and everything was great.
西双版纳。吃一些热带水果，看大象
