China Trip

The trip started by Krissy and I flying out to LA to catch our flight to Beijing, leaving at 12:40 AM, 11/8. We got to LA about 6 PM, the 7th, grabbed some dinner there, and then went through the process to get our ticket, and get our flight to Beijing.
It was about a 12 and a half hour flight from LAX to PEK, Bejing China. Twelve hours of barely any sleep, and when we got there, 5:30 AM local time, we started our touring. No break for sleep, start the sight-seeing.
We went to many places on the trip which I’ve never personally heard of, but indeed were really cool to see. Some key points were: Tian An Men Square, Temple of Heaven, Forbidden City, Great Wall, Ming Tombs, Summer Palace, Lingering Garden, Tiger Hill, Lingyin Temple, and took a cruise on West Lake. We went to a few different cities, Beijing, flew down to Shanghai and drove to Suzhou and to Hangzhou, and also toured Shanghai.
Why China you ask? Well, this was a trip called a “Business Leaders Trip To China” offered by Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, and was so cheap we couldn’t resist, Krissy’s parents and brother and sister-in-law also went. Given how inexpensive this trip was, including food, hotel, airfare, and tour guides while we were there, I was a little skeptical and wondered what the catch was.
Overall this was a very nice and informative trip. The food was good at first, but quickly got old, as you can see the last few days we had to hit KFC. I soon realized what the catch was. This trip is so cheap because this trip is sponsored by Chinese government, and they want us to spend money there. So while we did get to see the Great Wall and a few of the other Chinese tourist destinations, we spent a lot of time in these “factories” they called them. Well, it was just a big store, a big store to get us to buy stuff. So we would spend an hour at the Great Wall, and 3 hours at these factories. Don’t confuse these “factories” with a real factory, they made hardly anything there, only showed us a few details on how to make silk, a carpet, etc. Then made us walk through floors of shops and stores.
So this trip would be even nicer if we could spend more time sightseeing and less time shopping at their high priced American tourist stores. However with that said, and what we paid for this trip I really cannot complain. I would suggest for anyone to go on the trip, you do get to see everything, but as any tour is, you have to follow them.
Being China is the production capital of the world, there are a lot of factories there. Driving down the road you can see why there is lots of air pollution there. Lots of pictures show factories, and a lot of construction. China is a building country; they have buildings going up everywhere. Another interesting thing is that the average income in Shanghai is the equivalent of $200 USD per month. That is not even close to enough to live on, even there. So needless to say we can see why everything is made in China, labor is extremely cheap. Considering USA just hit 300 million people, and China has 1.3 billion people there, the value of the person isn’t that much.
As usual, I took a total of 2,685 pictures, went through them, deleted some blurry/duplicates and got that down to 2,333. I’ve got most them here:
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Also note that all the picture date and times are in CST, Shanghai and Beijing are 14 hours ahead of CST.
Oh, by the way, Krissy and I are now engaged.

Thanks to Mo and Aza for capturing this (the photo was not planned, they happened to see me doing it, and took the picture).

Yes this is the real one as apposed to the (fake one).