China out?

It feels like I'm doing a speed run of China. Because everyday it feels like I'm in a new city, Which is almost true. Last time I wrote I had been to Chengdu, chongqing and Zhangjiajie. Now i have also been to Fenghuang, Guangzhou and even made my way into Hong Kong! So I've officially left China! Kind of.... technically I'm still in China but a S.A.R. ( special administrative region) of China. Which means they have their own boarders and rules, but still is a part of China. But if we rewind a little bit and start with my visit to Fenghuang, which was my first stop after Zhangjiajie. It was a lovely little old town only 1 hour by train from Zhangjiajie. I only spent 1 day there, but it was a nice little break after spending 2 days walking around massive mountains. It was basicly just a lot of old small houses around a little river, but it was very beautiful along the evening when it started getting dark and all the lights along the water turned on and the town came to life. A lot of food and drinks everywhere and just a nice place to walk around and enjoy the atmosphere.

After a day of just enjoying the life in the small town I went to another small city called Guangzhou with a population of about 19 million. Guangzhou was a lot like chongqing, a massive city with skyscrapers everywhere. On the outside it's regular concrete and steel skyscrapers and in the heart of the city there are a lot of luxury malls, beautiful skyscrapers with neon lights and just a feeling of wealth. And just like other big cities you can see the big difference of incoming in the city. A taxi ride for 30 minutes cost about 50 kronor, a very nice hotel room cost 300 kronor. You can buy a handbag from one store for 50 kronor and next to it you have a store selling handbags for 10.000 kronor. It's the same in taiwan and vietnam as well, the salaries in the countries are massively different. But the positive thing you see is that there is an increased middle class in most of these countries. So the poor are becoming increasingly fewer year by year. Another fun thing about Guangzhou and this region is that there is about 90 million people living in this area called the pearl river delta. It's Hong Kong, shenzhen, Guangzhou and some more places. They are all about 1 hour away from each other by train and are all massive cities on their own. When china opened up it's economical rules and started allowing foreigner investors and companies to gain profits, this region exploded since it was close to hong kong which already was ruled by the British and already was a capitalist market. Which meant a lot of business in hong kong moved their production to the regions close by within China and could therefore save a lot of money. Which made investments into China explode, which meant jobs, which meant income, which meant the start of this mega region. In the middle of the 80s there was about 10 million people in this region and after this reform it now lives around 90 million here as I said before.

But I've now made my way into Hong kong, which I will continue writing about soon.