Chinese painting <3

[winter]

Beautiful interactive painting from the National Palace Museum (Republic of China). Also offering very pretty Year of the Tiger wallpapers.

(China's another place I'd love to make it to, based on my grandfather's tales. Language barrier scares me a bit, but then a colleague was there recently on his own and managed fine...)

Comments

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

As long as you stay on the tourist path and rely a bit on organized trips to places like the Great Wall, you should be fine (though you'll get robbed at the markets because haggling in English starts at ten times the price it does in Chinese). In places like Beijing, Shanghai or Xian, you can get by in English without too much trouble.

Where it gets interesting is if you go backpacking in the backcountry. :-)

[winter]

I do think that to actually experience the culture, I'd need a bit of the language, and that'd be a large time investment ^^; I'm not very fond of doing the tourist-trap thing, except for some reason in Japan (mostly because the Japanese are just as efficient at tourist).

[tokugawa.livejournal.com]

Ohh that Chinese painting is very beautiful indeed, :)

I need to go there one of these days but alas, the language barrier, :(

[wottie.livejournal.com]

Aw. China's definitely worth going to, you know - particularly if you have time to do the north and south (and maybe Hong Kong while you're in the area), just to experience the stark contrast between the beautiful unbeaten nature of the south versus the industrial, crazy-commercial north. (By south I mean way-south; Shanghai doesn't count, and is usually so cool that it's practically its own country anyway.) I speak enough Chinese to get by, but in year ten I went on a school trip with a whole lot of people who didn't speak nearly as much, and we went to some fairly-obscure areas and were fine. ♥ You should go!

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

Believe me, even knowing the language to a reasonable extent doesn't save you from tourist traps. It just means you get shoved into Chinese tour groups rather than foreigner groups. ;-)

[winter]

I'm just not that fond of tour groups as a whole ;)

[winter]

My colleague managed to go around on his own pretty well, as well as staying in hostels and buying things etc, but all in all... dunno what it is, but China intimidates me.

[winter]

At some point I probably will :) I'd need a trusted group, I think.