Travel Bucket List - 🇨🇳China Edition🐼

I’ve always dreamed of traveling but my family is more of the “vacation at the same place 🏰🐭✨ every year” sort of people. When I married my husband, the travel door was instantly opened as his family live in China. We took our first trip back to his homeland the past June and it was everything I could have hoped for and more for my first time out of the US.

I was the ✈️Travel Princess 👸 and got to just purely enjoy every second of our trip. No planning. No organizing. Just being. 😎

Here are some of the amazing things we did:

🥘🍛🍒 Eat good food - We were full all day, every day. We met up with friends and family in each city we visited and were introduced to the popular foods from each city. Xi’an was big on making foods look like other foods. Like meats made to look like 🍇fruits. Pastries made to look like 🎨🖌️paint brushes. Datong is huge on rabbit head 🐰🐇 which was shocking as a vanilla American.

🚅🛤️💺 Ride a bullet train - I’d never ridden a train before ever. We chose to do a 6 hour train ride through the country from Datong to Xi’an instead of a 1 hour flight. Absolutely worth it! This gave me time to make my first post on Lemon8 and look through the pictures we’d taken on the trip so far. The food was pretty good and the seats were way more comfortable than a flight. Overall 10/10 experience and would do it again!

⛰️🏯🏞️ See the Great Wall - I think this is a must do no matter what when you visit China. The most iconic and well-known historical structure in China. Uncle took us to one of the tourist areas to walk along the preserved and reconstructed wall and buildings. He then took us to a less known area on the way home where we hiked to an untouched area of the wall where we could see what the original looked like and walk along the worn down path. This was the most beautiful experience. My husband and I went up by ourselves and tbh we ALMOST gave up and didn’t finish climbing all the way up. We’re so glad we kept going because being at the top is one of our favorite memories that we’ll carry forever. I can’t express the feeling you get at the top of such a historical and beautiful location.

🌄🌅🗺️ Visit ancient places - We visited the Great Wall, ancient temples, places where powerful people of the past used to live, and so much more. I’ll continue sharing pictures we took and things we learned in posts to come! The magnitude and craftsmanship of these places was absolutely insane.

🐴🦁🏯 Learn some history - Fun fact: The cute little animal statue is actually where people would tie their horses when they were visiting. You can find these all over the place in certain historic places. You can also stay in ancient historic places like the last image. This is at Datong in one of the tourism areas. There are tons of shops and street vendors and beautiful architecture to take in around here.

I can’t wait to post more about this trip because I wish I was still there. We can’t wait to go back and to visit new places.

Have you been to China? Where are places you’d like to visit?

Places mentioned: Datong Xi'An Great Wall of China