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A TripAdvisor™ TripWow slideshow of a travel blog to Gongyi, China by TravelPod blogger Guavamama titled “Hop, skip, bounce” Guavamama’s travel blog entry: “There are some places that have completely absorbed in their history, making it impossible for you to ignore. You cannot help but watch, feel and even eat it. Paris, Rome, and even downtown Detroit with its riot-scarred buildings and sick infestation of cars are all cities where history is infused with the current. But when you’re a foreigner in China, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the country’s the world’s oldest civilization. And I don’t think that’s that weird – the country consumes the majority of the world’s cement and steel (and, I suspect, bathroom tiling. There is a weird fetish with covering buildings in tile that I’ve only ever seen in showers) in its quest to remodel the nation. When people first come to China, they are confronted with the physical fact of what is going on in this country – a complete overhaul in the Chinese urban landscape and a re-focusing of what a Chinese life means. Then there’s Henan. Dirty, dusty, dire Henan (but oh I love it for those qualities). The province is too poor and too shackled with AIDS villages for the government to hold it in its thick fingers of cemented development. So it does what it can by mixing its fair share of bathroom tiled buildings where cramped hutongs used to be and using its bits of Chinese history to attract tourists. But we haven’t explored most of …
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