Hello Everyone,

Welcome to The Invisible Vision Project’s Blog.

It’s been a long while since I last blogged, the reason for that is because I was away for almost an entire month in July. I was on vacation in China with my family, traveling and visiting relatives that are living there.

Some of you may not know this, since I never really talked about it yet on this blog. I was born and mostly raised in China. At the age of 14, I moved to Canada, and I’ve been living in Canada for almost 13 years now. But,  since the time I left China, I never went back to visit, so it really has been a LONG time!

In today’s blog, I want to share with you about my experience of visiting China- both the good, and the bad. This will probably be a very long blog post, so be prepared, and maybe, grab a snack and something to drink would help! First of all, the one thing…or probably two things I want to say about China is: TOO hot and TOO many people! This is not really a surprise, because China has a huge population; and as for the hot weather, from what I heard, this year is just a bit unusual; but, it’s still definitely more humid there than where I live now.

I visited two cities in China on this trip- Beijing, China’s capital, and, the City of Dalian, which is where I was born. I stayed in Beijing and visited a total of 3 places: The Forbidden City, The Great Wall of China, and The Summer Palace. To be honest, I’ve been to The Forbidden City once, that was when I was 7, since a long time had passed, so it was a good experience to revisit. But, climbing The Great Wall of China was NOT so easy; although, I wouldn’t really call it ‘climbing,’ because, I sat on a cable-car that carry tourists up to the mountain, and I only needed to climb about one ‘floor’ (which took about 20 minutes, there’re a total of 7 ‘floor’ in that area). But, because the road surface is very uneven, since it was built a LONG TIME ago (no consideration on accessibility!), for a blind girl, this was VERY DIFFICULT! And, the trip to The Summer Palace was OK, it’s a lot of sightseeing, since what it is is just a never-ending garden! It will really take a long time to visit all of the gardens inside it, so that didn’t happen (visiting one was already tiring), but the view was indeed really pretty!

Now, here comes the most important part of this travel: Going Home Sweet Home! I’ve mentioned at the beginning of this blog,  I left my hometown in China about 13 years ago; so, this visit is very important to me, to revisit my hometown, and to visit my grandparents and relatives that are still living there. The day I arrived in the City of Dalian was very emotional, I could not hold back the tears, and the first thing I said after arriving was: “I’m finally home.” While I was in Dalian, I had the opportunity to visit some places, especially places that are meaningful to me, like: the old apartment that I used to live, my last school that I attended; and, of course, I visited Dalian’s downtown area, The Sunasia Ocean World (which is known as the biggest Aquarium in Asia), and, the seaside, because one of Dalian’s biggest tourist attraction in the summer is the beach, since Dalian is surrounded by the sea!

Overall, I will say that I had a great experience of visiting China, (despite the extreme humidity!). And, I had a lot of fun sightseeing and spent time with relatives that I haven’t seen in a long time. But, some of the things in China that did get on my nerve, one being: safety issues. I had so much anxiety when crossing streets/intersections in China, simply because there’re no stop signs, and for some intersections, there’re even NO TRAFFIC LIGHTS! People are rushing, cars are rushing, and that made me, as a person with Visual Impairment VERY CONFUSED AND DIFFICULT to cross roads. And, the second thing that bothered me a lot was: people are so not considerate, they’re rather ignorant. I am a White Cane user, but people act like they can’t see me, when clearly, they should and can see better than I can see them! But, I will say, there was this ONE time, someone saw me getting on the subway, stood up and gave her seat to me, I was actually a little surprised by that, but that only happened once. Overall, I will say that I had a great experience of visiting China, (despite the extreme humidity!). And, I had a lot of fun sightseeing and spent time with relatives that I haven’t seen in a long time. But, some of the things in China that did get on my nerve, one being: safety issues. I had so much anxiety when crossing streets/intersections in China, simply because there’re no stop signs, and for some intersections, there’re even NO TRAFFIC LIGHTS! People are rushing, cars are rushing, and that made me, as a person with Visual Impairment VERY CONFUSED AND DIFFICULT to cross roads. And, the second thing that bothered me a lot was: people are so not considerate, they’re rather ignorant. I am a White Cane user, but people act like they can’t see me, when clearly, they should and can see better than I can see them! But, I will say, there was this ONE time, someone saw me getting on the subway, stood up and gave her seat to me, I was actually a little surprised by that, but that only happened once.

To conclude, overall,  I had a good quality of time visiting China. I would love to go back and visit again, probably in a few years. But, I probably didn’t say this, and I will say it now: the 13 or so hours of flying was not so pleasant at all. My body, with an unstable and concerning heart condition, it had begun to act up about 9 hours into the flight. I’m just glad that I made it through, both ways. And, if someone is able to invent a faster way of going to China from North America, I will really appreciate that and probably would go back more often!

So, this concludes today’s blog. Thank you for reading to the End!

By: The Invisible Vision Project