We enjoyed a couple days in Shenzhen and are now on our way to Hong Kong! After we made it here a couple days ago in the morning and got checked in to our hotel, we had lunch with a friend of my father-in-law’s. Then we decided to go out and check out the city! We discovered that Shenzhen really doesn’t have a lot of tourist attractions. Not long ago Shenzhen was a fishing village, after China’s Reform and Opening Up policy in the late 70’s it became a Special Economic Zone for the People’s Republic of China and billions of dollars of domestic and foreign investment flowed into this city. It has had a booming economy ever since but there is very little historical sites since most everything has been built in the last few decades.
Like much of China, Shenzhen does have a fair amount of construction going on. It does have some pretty scenery though, and a nice museum we were able to check out. Shenzhen is also a very clean and orderly city. Movies are a bit expensive though, lacking other options my wife and I went and saw The Amazing Spiderman 2 at the theater, it cost about 240 RMB for the two of us (that’s nearly $40 USD)! They also made us put down a 100 RMB deposit for each of the pairs of 3D glasses. We got the deposit back after the movie pending we didn’t break the glasses! The movie was good, but that of course is outside the scope of topics for this blog 
We had dinner with friends of the family a couple times while we were there, I experienced the tradition at Chinese dinners of toasting several times and clinking glasses throughout the meal. The last thing I noticed was how poor my Chinese really is! Normally I can communicate with my wife and her parents in Chinese passably okay, but at a dinner with 10+ people all talking about politics and their children’s educations at the same time I became lost quite frequently!
The meals we ate were all Dim Sum style with several different dishes on a circular platform (can’t really think of a good word) that spun to allow all the different people at the table to be able to pick food off it to eat out of their own bowls. We ate lots of different vegetables, buns filled with different meats, seafood, along with lamb and beef as well.
The experience was not one I’ll soon forget. To sum up Shenzhen I would say that it is probably a nice place to live, but not really a good place for a vacation, luckily it’s just the first stop on our way to more exciting destinations this trip. Below are some pictures of Shenzhen and then pictures from the museum we visited. I do have to say the museum was quite interesting, African weapons, wax sculptures of Chinese people from different ages, and a lot of historical information, if you ever find yourself in Shenzhen the museum is worth a visit!
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