Thoughts on China

The more I visit this...'continent' the more I fall in love with the place! I called it a continent because coming from Wales everything here is just too big a scale to call a country, everything about is massive;  the geography, the population, the ambition, the infrastructure , the stark contrasts between wealth and poverty and climate, the humility and generosity of the people, the variety of food. It all boggles the mind!

For example I'm in a small city, Zhuzhou City in Hunan Province, it's small but still bigger than the population of Wales; Chongqing last week 28,000,000 almost ten times the size of Wales, 50% as big as the UK......one city! Herfei where I visited last year, about 11,000,000, and in the last two years the local government there has completed a building project to erect enough housing and commercial accommodation to double the population of the city, another 11,000,000 people can now live in the city!!! Boggling or what?

I can't say it's a picturesque country from my experience so far, I know there are mind blowingly beautiful parts outside of the cities, what I have seen, so far,  is mostly ugly heavily industrialised, grime covered metropolis or examples of the futuristic world of 'Blade Runner' and surrounding suburbs, but the overriding joy of being here is the people.  The Chinese are incredibly warm, generous (almost unconditionally so) and have a brilliant sense of humour, welcoming to strangers and really interested in finding out more about them (nosy) I see a lot of similarities between the Welsh and the Chinese!!