Colorful Anita & Jim on our day trip to a big Buddha-like temple

Imagine you’re in Hangzhou, you had a couple beautiful days around West Lake, but the weather is supposed to be turning pretty bad throughout the region; cold and wet. What do you do? Change plans a bit, go further afield than planned, and head to the beach!

When you say “the beach” in China, that pretty much means Hainan, an island in the South China Sea east of the Gulf of Tonkin and about the size of Belgium. The rest of the country is too far north to have great or even particularly good beaches (especially this time of year), but Hainan is sort of the Hawaii of China.

The pools of our resort with the South China Sea in the background

When we go to the beach, there’s usually not a lot to write about. The day is pretty much breakfast, reading at the beach or pool, lunch, reading at the beach or pool, dinner, sleep. Repeat. And for the most part that’s what we did. We’re still traveling with my brother Al and his family, and you might guess that eight-year-old Jacob and nine-year-old Sierra had no objections to hanging out in the sun and at the pool. So it was a really laid back six days.

We’ve experienced this before. Westerners are pretty rare in much of China and it’s not unusual at all for people to stop us and ask to have their pictures taken with us. They know we’re not celebrities or anything; they just don’t see many people with the kind of funny eyes we have.

At Anita’s instigation, we did one fun day trip outside the resort. We hired a car and went first to the Guanyin of the South Sea, a 350-foot statue of a bodhisattva (an enlightened person) on the south coast of the island. We’ve seen a lot of buddha-type stuff in our travels, but this one was pretty good: a great location on the coast and really tall. Then we went up some big hill to a really good Thai restaurant for lunch. After days at the resort with food that was mediocre at best, this was a real treat.

So that was it. A lot of time at the beach and pool, lots of chances for the kids to run around and have fun, lots of reading. From here we’re off to Chengdu, one of the fastest growing cities on earth.

Here we are with Jacob & Sierra in the temple area. Spending lots of time with them has been a real highlight of the year.

This was our lunch stop when we broke out of the resort for a day. The food was as good as the view.

The skyline of Pudong, the financial center of Shanghai. The tallest building over on the right is the Shanghai Tower, while the World Financial Center and Jin Mao Tower are the somewhat smaller buildings to the left.

From Macau we flew to Shanghai to meet my brother Al and his family: wife Anita and cute kids Sierra and Jacob. We’re going to spend two weeks with them hanging out in China, the longest visit we’ve had so far in our nearly two years of travel. We’ve observed before that far from feeling isolated from family and friends while we’re traveling the world, we sometimes see more of people than we ever would have while we were working and all in the States. This is a great example; as far as we can remember I haven’t spent two consecutive weeks with Al since 1979, and I’ve never spent much quality time with his kids. So we’re pretty excited about this chance to hang out for a while.

Sierra and Jacob enjoying a peaceful moment in People’s Park

So what do you do when you’re got three days in the world’s largest city? In part, for the rest of the St. Georges, you try to deal with jet lag. It is certainly one of the greatest advantages of the way Mark & I are traveling that we rarely experience jet lag, as we almost never cross more than one time zone in a day. Beyond that, though, we walked around a lot, enjoying the early spring climate and admiring the beautiful skyline of Pudong, the section of the city across the Huangpu River. The skyline of Pudong includes three pretty remarkable buildings: the Jin Mao Tower, a beautiful 88-story building that, when we stayed at the Hyatt in it eight years ago was the tallest building in China; the Shanghai World Financial Center, a 101-story building that was the second-tallest building in the world when it was finished in 2007; and the 128-story Shanghai Tower, now the second-tallest building in the world.

Me and my “little” brother Al, his wife Anita, and Jacob & Sierra

Then, when the kids were a little tired of Mark & Jim’s forced march across the city we did a tour of the city on the local “Hop On, Hop Off” bus, a great way to see more of the city quickly. The highlight, though, was the amusement park in People’s Park in central Shanghai. It was a pretty small little diversion, but I guess if you’re eight or nine years old – or, in the case of Mark somewhat older than that – even a small amusement park is a heckuva lot of fun. And if you’re a child-deprived adult, watching them might be even more fun than they had.

So that was Stop One on the tour of China. A lot more to come….

Someone sure enjoyed the amusement park

Walking through the park I saw this garden of pansies and yelled to Al “Hey, get a picture of these pansies!” and then posed with Mark. He was less amused by my humor than I was.

And here was a random woman practicing her Tai Chi in front of a Dunkin’ Donuts. There are a LOT of Dunkin’ Donuts in Boston, but I’ve never seen that.

Such cute kids!

Jacob admiring the view of Pudong

Uncle Mark with the kids

And finally, a modern Chinese version a Cobb Salad. It was pretty great.