There were a number of people who were quite surprised we didn't come home with a Chinese baby. In fact, Nicole had taken a picture of one of them and called him Bruce. I'm not sure if she was naming him after Bruce Lee or what, but here's a picture.
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| They call me Bruce... |
I figured explaining our choice would make a good frame story. Like the story that contains smaller vignettes in some popular movies, this will kind of host or frame out the topics I'll be covering over the next couple weeks.
We went to China quite on a whim. We purchased a tour that went through Rewards Travel China. If you have a look at the web page, you'll see a pretty good smattering of tours similar to ours.
Better still, it was a Groupon. If you're not using Groupon, you're doing it wrong. They, and similar services like LivingSocial, have provided us with awesome experiences, from spa packages and travel packages to Segway tours and river rafting tours. It's a great way to try new things at a discount. China was a curve ball out of left field - no, wait. Curve balls don't come from there... Argh.
Our tour group agreed that going to China was on no one's bucket list, but every one of us said that the price was so amazing that they couldn't resist. I know I didn't resist it when Nicole found the offer.
Nicole was mostly screwing around one morning when she sent me a "See China, 10 days, 8 nights, airfare, hotel, and food included, only $999" deal. My response was, basically, "For that much, why not look into it?" She was caught off guard. We talk about traveling all the time, and this destination had never come up. We started talking about it, though, trying to see if we could put it together or whether it was moot.
Obviously, we needed someone to watch the kids if we were going to make it happen. Grammie (Nicole's mom) is retired, so she agreed to take one for the team and put in a solid week and a half helping us watch the kids, ferry them to school and the bus stop, help with homework, get us over the jet lag, etc. It helped that GrandBear (Nicole's dad) came out over the weekend we were gone to give her a break and some adult company.
Then, schedule. I had to get the time off work, and Nicole had to work around the weddings she already had scheduled for October and November. That, however, worked out.
That $999/person price only applied to a single weekend departure in October, and it wasn't one that we could swing, so we looked at the other weekends available. The weekend we left (October 13th), the price was still only $1499, fantastic price for what was offered. When we looked, the round trip (direct, non-stop) flights alone during that time were going for somewhere in the $1800-$2000 neighborhood. Add that to $100/night hotel rooms (per person, the rooms were all $200 a night) for 8 nights, and then add in all the hotel breakfasts, the lunches, and almost all of the dinners, and you can see why our deal bells were going off like mad.
Of course, if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is, so our scam alarms were going off, too. The folks that we worked with at Rewards Travel China were generally responsive, but every few weeks, something would happen that made us worry a bit that they'd just take our money and run. In fact, I wasn't perfectly comfortable until the plane was in the air on the way to Beijing. And in the plane, I wasn't perfectly comfortable for other reasons.
So that's how we ended up making the decision to go to China. We saw things there I never imagined seeing, and we did things I never imagined doing. I was grateful for the tour guides we had for the tour, as the language is a significant barrier for us westerners. They helped immensely and I feel we had a much richer experience because they were there. They were able to point us in good directions and keep us from going in bad directions, as well as able to help us get to where we wanted to be. They were our personal protectors in a strange land.
Ultimately, I'm very happy with our decision to take the tour. I highly recommend both China and Rewards Travel China for anyone who's got a hankering for adventure but is still a little worried that it would be difficult to get around. They put together a great itinerary and wrapped us in a little safe cocoon where we could be safe and still explore some very interesting bits of China.
Now, my next few posts are going to be a brain dump of my time in China. While I took notes chronologically, my intent is to blog about things topically across the trip, with the subjects covering things like drinking, eating, shopping, pooping, signage, sanitation, culture, and architecture. I will include pictures where I have them. I hope you enjoy reading about our trip, and if you have questions or comments, I would be happy to discuss while the thoughts are fresh!
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