China.
I recently visited China with my parents for the first time during May. I shared this observation in various forms to some and thought it was somewhat worth posting:
Tourist traps galore
My parents booked a chunk of our trip with a tour guide service. Apparently, it’s extremely common for tour guide services to include a series of tourist traps between travel destinations. Ours was no exception. We hit no less than seven such tourist traps. Each sold wares made of jade, copper, tea, ceramic, silk, or life-sized terra cotta warrior replicas.
The tourism industry there has standardized on a sales format:
1. Each begins one hour before lunch with a brief 5-10min introduction from an English speaking representative. The representative summarizes the labor-intensive process involved in producing the one of a kind products that can only be purchased at this special factory. This introduction normally involves walking down a long hallway past large glass windows showcasing live, smilling artisans working diligently in different stages of production.
2. The hallway leads to a very large showroom filled with no less than half-a-dozen English-speaking women in traditional Chinese dress spread out strategically in zone formation across the room making it impossible to casually browse products without being accosted.
3. At this point, the tour guide disappears (I assume to get paid) so that you must browse products within the showroom for a preset amount of time.
4. The tour guide reappears sometime later and leads you to lunch which is generally located in a restaurant that is directly above the showroom.
5. Lunch is served the moment you sit down and includes reasonable quality chinese food, but for some reason ALWAYS includes a dish of poorly fried french fries.
6. Throughout the rest of the tour, street venders sell the same one of a kind products found at the special factory for at least 1/3 as much.
Other commentary
I found the cities in China to be really modern and perhaps more progressive than most cities in the U.S. Consistent pedestrian signals for the visually impaired, public recycling bins, glassy skyscrapers, and what seems like an amazing well-organized response for quake victims.
But underneath that, there are definitely signs that still reflect a somewhat closed state. The government owns all land, so any private land use is acquired through long-term lease—no one seemed to know what will happen when the leases start expiring. They had this three day period of mourning after the quake where they shut off any entertainment related television. Only the government-run CCTV played on all chinese channels. CNN was the only foreign television station allowed. The government also posted a lot of pro-China propaganda-ish advertisements on TV and billboards almost immediately after the quake.