Friday, April 01, 2011

China and the Republic of China

We recently returned from a trip to Taiwan and China.  Or as the governments of those countries might prefer us to say: we recently returned from a trip to China.  (The Chinese government claims Taiwan is part of China.  Officially, the Taiwan government--also known as the Republic of China--seems to claim this too, but claims that the Taiwan government is the legitimate government of all of China.  But the Republic of China doesn't seem to pursue this claim anymore.)

We had a wide variety of experiences.  We helped out on an organic farm in southern Taiwan.  We visited the beaches of Hainan, an island in southern China.  We visited my wife's relatives in a few different cities.  We biked in Chinese traffic (a bit scary).  We saw the mini terra cotta army in Xuzhou (not to be confused with the full-size terra cotta army in Xi'an, which we didn't see).  And near the end, we saw a few of the Beijing area's big attractions like the Great Wall and the Forbidden City.

I'll try to write more about a couple of specific parts of the trip another time, but this is all for now.

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