New and Old China

Hello again from Chengdu, home of the giant pandas!

Chengdu is an enormous city, much bigger than Birmingham.  It has 14 million people in it.  Wow.

Most of the city is very new.  I have never seen so many skyscrapers.  There was lots of traffic too but luckily but most people ride electric motorbikes so there wasn't too much noise.  (Electric motorbikes are much quieter than the normal ones.)  I wonder if Adam, Robin and Grace ever see electric cars and motorbikes in Birmingham?  

Uncle Guy and Auntie Susan also used the underground trains to travel around Chengdu, just like in London.  They found it quite difficult to buy their tickets though, because everything was written in a language called Mandarin.  Mandarin letters are different from English letters so we couldn't read them.  Luckily some very friendly people from Chengdu helped us.  

After seeing so many new buildings it was interesting to visit this Buddhist temple.

There are still some monks living here.  I think they spend most of their time praying but I was happy to see that they had a table tennis table so they can have a bit of fun in their time off!

You don't see as many old buildings in China as in Europe.  About fifty years ago, China's government decided that it wanted to concentrate on the future instead of the past, so it decided to destroy lots of old buildings.  This is very sad as lots of beautiful places in China were destroyed.  (The government has changed its mind now and it tries to protect beautiful old buildings.)

There are some other things that Robin, Adam and Grace might find different about life in China.  There are some websites that you aren't allowed to use.  For example, Robin, Adam and Grace wouldn't be able to hunt for minecraft videos using Google during their daily screen time because Google is banned in China.  (China's government thinks Google gives you information that's wrong sometimes.  I reckon it sometimes gives you bad information and sometimes it gives you good information, so you have to be rather clever and decide which is which.  What do Adam, Robin and Grace think?)

Anyway, that's why you didn't hear from me for a while - because I'm using Google Blogger to write my blog and it isn't allowed in China.  I hope you didn't mind too much!

I enjoyed my visit though.  China is an enormous country with lots more to see.  I'd like to come back for another trip some day!