Preparing for China

You can’t prepare for China. My Husband and I are taking our second trip to China in a little over a week. We have our visas (which was a major pain), and we have had our airline and hotel reservations settled for some time. Now, we are trying to figure out what to pack and making arrangements to keep the home-fires burning while we are away. All of this is necessary and will make the trip doable, but none of it really prepares us for China, at least based upon my experience from the last trip.

China is intense. It is crowded, busy, brusque, often unfeeling, and always loud. There is no preparing for that. You just drop yourself into it and try to swim along as best you can. This time, we will spend most of the trip in Shanghai, the most populous city on earth – I can only imagine. At least, we will not be on our own at any point, as we were during the last trip. So hopefully, it will all be easier to manage, but still the country is what it is. And it is intense.

Nevertheless, it is exciting. How cool to get serious enough about the study of Kung Fu that travel to China just seems like a necessary component? Yes, this is who I want to be, opening all doors, experiencing good, bad, hard, uncomfortable, and surely joyous. More joyous, however, if United Airlines upgrades us to business class. I have my fingers crossed on that.