from Analie
Back in Colorado, I used to look at the Denver city line and think ‘Look how polluted Denver is!’, but getting to China has changed my view on that entirely. Looking back to the beginning of our trip, in Hong Kong, the humidity and pollution were more than evident. Buildings had grime and dirt running down their sides, and at times, you could barely see the buildings in the distance. Some of that was attributed to the little rain we were experienced during our stay, but most of it was just city pollution.
Guangzhou wasn’t that much better, in comparison. We did see a little patch of blue sky on occasion, but otherwise it was almost worse than Hong Kong. Looking into the Yellow River from across our hotel was almost sad, to see all of the trash floating on the sides of the river. What was especially evident in Guangzhou was the mold. When we first went into our hotel rooms, the smell of mold was in the air and black stains presented themselves on the walls. It got to a point of having to switch hotel rooms during the night.
Luckily, our next destination was Guilin, which was much more remote than the previous cities. Here, though it was rainy and rather overcast, the air was much cleaner. Unfortunately, going back to the big cities again, Xian showed much more pollution that we were used to in Colorado. It was undoubtedly better than our first two cities, but it was still hard to see buildings at times. Fortunately, the humidity had definitely gone down as we slowly moved North, and the mold smell was less present. After Xian, we flew to Beijing, which was a little worse than Xian, but somehow felt better than Guangzhou. Of course, it’s hard to say that when looking out the airport window you can hardly see beyond the flight towers. Can’t wait to get back to Colorado skies!  Analie
