a smile

This post is about a day spent in the Old Town of Pingyao. It caters heavily to international tourists. And still there are Mao figurines.

We spent Christmas hanging out in the Old Town of Pingyao:

Officially it’s called Pingyao Ancient City 平遥古城, and it’s one of the few old towns in China that wasn’t destroyed or at least heavily damaged during Mao Zedong’s “Cultural Revolution”. The city walls are still intact. The old buildings are still there. The old merchant city has lost its merchants, and it has become a tourist attraction. But at least it hasn’t been destroyed or “reconstructed”.

A beautiful place.

international tourism

I still missed my home over Christmas. Maybe it was just the gingerbread. I really like gingerbread. But the fact that she was there with me really brightened up my day.

Also, she took me to have a good sirloin steak with french fries in one of the restaurants primarily serving to foreigners.

This is actually a major difference to most of the other old towns I’ve come through on the way here:

Pingyao is heavily focused on international tourists. A lot of the signs are in Chinese as well as English, and people seem to try hard to anticipate what foreign tourists might want.

Which is why I really don’t understand why there are so many of these:

They seem to be for sale on every corner, and it makes me wonder: are there really that many foreigners who buy figurines of mass murderers?