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).

[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 ;)