So as some of you may already know I am about to embark on a one-month trip to China and Hong Kong with my parents and brother.
Our itinerary for the month takes us to Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Macau, and Hong Kong among other smaller places along the way.
Since my parents are both originally from China and I grew up as a "Chinese"-Canadian I suppose China has always occupied a sort of deferential yet mysterious place in my psyche although interestingly enough, I've never been there. My parents ran a business and never had much time for traveling when I was a child. As a teen and young adult I was more interested in exploring Europe and the opportunity to visit China never arose.
I now regret not having had the opportunity to visit sooner. Being "Chinese" yet never having visited the country or meeting my family there is slightly paradoxical. In recent years China has opened up a lot to Western tourism especially with last year's Olympics in Beijing and next year's Expo in Shanghai. I also have many world-beating friends who have visited and who are always surprised to hear I haven't yet been. It's gotten to the point where I'm actually really embarrassed to admit that I've never been.
Traveling with my family will be a bit of a challenge, or at least a new experience. Until now our family vacations consisted of weekend trips to Toronto, day trips to Montreal.
This trip will be the first time we'll be taking a substantial family vacation. It's been quite a few years in the planning. My grandmother (who helped raise my brother and I when we were children then subsequently returned to China) has been asking us to visit for years. My brother and I have also been asking our parents to take the trip with us for years. It's only been recently that the stars have aligned for a trip like this to take place, my parents have started to scale down their business operations and are now comfortable with taking a month away, my brother and I are in jobs where we have enough vacation to do a trip of this length.
Unfortunately, we will be visiting China during the hottest time of year. My brother is a teacher which means he has very little flexibility as to when he can take time off and summer was pretty much our only option. With temperatures in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong forecast to reach into the low 40s Celcius with humidity the trip will be a hot, sweaty endeavour.
Traveling with the family will also mean giving up some of the freedom I'm used to. I'm normally a very independent traveler having backpacked through Europe, visited Japan and several places in the States by myself. I like the flexibility of solo travel and the fact that I'm able to do what I want when I want without making any concessions to other people's wants or needs.
The first part of our trip, Beijing through Shanghai will consist of a ten-day package tour. I normally despise package tours for several reasons; being herded around in big groups like cattle, not having any flexibility to what you see or when you see it, being corralled from one overpriced gift shop to the next, only seeing the sanitized touristy parts of places and never being able to interact with locals or have any authentic experiences is not my style of traveling. However, seeing as I'll have my parents in tow, I was willing to make the concession of going on a package tour because my neurotic Chinese mother would never trust me to arrange the trip logistics on my own and would be constantly badgering me and second-guessing me the entire time. What I give up in independence in accepting the package tour I'm sure to get back in sanity. And as my brother told me, I'll likely have plenty of other opportunities in my lifetime to return to China to visit the places I want to see the way I want to see them.
While traveling with my parents will undoubtedly present challenges; my brother and I don't live at home anymore and we're not used to constantly having to deal with my mother's neurotic tendencies anymore. I'm sure there'll be times of frustration and times where we all get on each others' nerves as we really haven't spent significant time together as a family-unit for years now. I am, however, looking forward to sharing this experience with my brother and my parents (while they're still physically fit enough to undertake such a lengthy trip). The experience is a little bittersweet as this is our first trip of this length as a family but it may also be the last time we get to do something like this. I know I'm going to make my best effort to taking the little annoyances in stride and focusing on maximizing the experience at hand.
The first little annoyance . . . the 16-hour flight from Chicago to Beijing. Wish me luck!
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