This is part of a series of posts that... etc etc, I'm already getting bored with this. This post and, if I get around to writing them, the last one or two in this series are/will be pretty awful. I advise against reading them. Some of the pictures might be okay, though.

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UPDATE: Oops, among all the pretentious negativity I almost forgot the coolest part of the day (and possibly all the features of the tour):

At one of the great bridges spanning the Yangtze in Nanjing, we had yet another sales bonanza sprung on us.

Something of a "Hey, what's this? A world-famous artist? And he's selling his art? Why, we'd be fools not to take a closer look!" kind of thing. Painfully transparent, especially since I saw the tour guide collaborating with the floor walkers, guiding them to the prime buyers. But the art was actually kind of cool. And even if the artist was kind of a dick, I suppose I can understand; it would be hard to focus when you have endless tours shuffling in every day snapping photos of you.

I actually thought about buying one; a tiny jar, with an entire poem painted on the inside with a single-horsehair brush.

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After a good night's sleep – I have discovered that going to bed early is key during these trips, where the normal wake-up call is 6am – I am back in a more suitable frame of mind, amused instead of irritated at the slightly preposterous notion that this is a tour.

From my perspective, it is most like a Florida timeshare deal, where you might get a free weekend in Orlando in exchange for sitting through an interminable series of sales pitches. The benefit for the salesman is obvious; their pitch is delivered to a captive audience and thinly disguised as entertainment. The benefit for the tourist, is… well… shit, you got a free weekend in Florida, what do you have to bitch about?

It was fairly clear to me at the outset what this "tour" actually was, and yet most of our fellow travelers seem thoroughly oblivious. I have yet to decide whether this is evidence of a fundamental disconnect between wealth and critical thinking, or this is actually the kind of experience these people are looking for. While an unpleasant thought, I am increasingly convinced that the latter is not an impossibility.

In all honesty, I can see how this kind of thing would appeal to a certain mindset. There is a fairly large set of people out there who are disinterested in or unable to experience China on a local level. They simply lack the necessary time, energy, empathy, or – sadly – skin color to relate to the local population on their own wavelength.

That last factor is not one that can normally be controlled, but I readily admit its significance here. Foreigners ( wai guo ren / 外国人 ) are simply unable to connect beyond a certain level with the locals ( ben di ren / 本地人 ). Even I, who have genetic and linguistic advantages in this respect, am only now starting to regularly pass as Chinese.

However, when it comes to the other factors, it doesn't take long before you can reliably identify those who have little actual interest in their surroundings or the people occupying them for more than a week at a time. Rather, their primary motivation is being able to say they've been there, ideally while having tangible evidence on display to back it up.

In the simplest possible terms, they're the suckers.

It doesn't matter what's for sale, or how inflated the prices are. They cruise the globe, trailing a wake of credit card receipts, fluorescing sales commissions and dopaminergic smiles.

Their shopping experience has been thoroughly sterilised. There are no inappropriately curious mongrels nosing at your crotch, or whiffs of rancid shit or stinky tofu ( chou dou fu / 臭豆腐 ）(it can be surprisingly difficult to tell one from the other) wafting in from the neighbours. Instead, there are simply rows upon rows of near-identical products, between a battery of buzzing lights and gleaming marble tile.

Even the sales people seem to have been sanitised for their protection; sleek young men and women sporting identical uniforms glide back and forth across the sales floor, flat black gazes mirrored in their polished buttons, following your movements around the room.

The only thing missing is a paper sash to tear off them before buying something.

Contrast this with the experience shopping on the street, where one's salesperson is just as likely to be a high schooler with Eastwood eyes smoking a cigarette,  or an old woman – I hesitate to use the word "crone" however much the situation might call for it – with a decided lack of teeth, washing underwear in a dark corner and gumming a betel nut with grim determination.

These shopping expeditions – up to three hours at a stretch – are punctuated with bus rides to and from venues. Sandwiched between are short bursts of culture, sometimes as abbreviated as standing in a parking lot near a famous lake for ten minutes before boarding for the next stop. We are inevitably accompanied by our singularly unappealing female tour guide, who flirts crudely with the unmarried men of the group – this is one of the very few industries in China where tipping has become institutionalized. The tastelessness continues unabated as our venue draws into sight; she seamlessly switches to a sales pitch, softening up the crowd for the coming mob of salespeople.

I use the word "mob," but this is actually a meticulously organized sort of assault. There are entire industries built upon the steel-belted radials of these tour buses, sprung up virtually overnight especially to siphon money from overseas bank accounts into Chinese coffers.

Enormous outlets that specialize in one product – jade, silk, pearl, clay teapots, and Chinese medicine are just a few we've seen on this trip – are surrounded by parking lots painted solely with bus-sized parking spaces. Outside are hung signs that follow a similar pattern, and are all the more interesting for their frank honesty: [City name] Shopping Center for International Tourists.

In truth, I envy these people. Much like insurance companies, they have struck upon a near-perfect business model.

They have a captive audience that is mandated by law, as the local governments require any tour group of this type to stop at one shopping destination per day.

Their ventures are subsidized with taxpayer money. To put this into perspective, our week-long tour cost 99 US Dollars. One night at any one of the hotels we've stayed at would normally cost anywhere between $150 and $300. Our group numbered well above 300 members, and there are nonstop trips throughout the tourist season. Even with massive group rate discounts, you can imagine the government outlay.

There must be similar operations everywhere – if the U.S. has none, then we are irretrievably silly – but it is yet another example of how personal relationships ( guan xi / 关系 ）can make nearly anything possible. Apparently, if you are friends with the right people (or grease the right wheels), your government will pay through the nose to bring wealthy, uninformed customers to your door and trap them for hours in the same room as your top salespeople.

It is, in the barest terms, an enormous hoax. The same products sold in these outlets can be bought on the street, sometimes just next door, for a quarter of the price. But traveling in these tours, you never see the street – for much of the customer base, that's kind of the whole point.

And that's why I've four more days with people who read books with titles like "The Power of Passion: Achieve Your Own Everests".

This is part of a series of posts that are going to detail my time as part of a week-long, five-star-studded, guided group tour my father arranged for us. Initially I thought it would be a short trip around Shanghai, and agreed to go in the hopes that maybe… just maybe… my dad and I could spend some quality time together.

…Yeah.

In any event, the posts are going to come more or less in reverse order, since the trip is almost over and I’m writing what’s most fresh in my mind at the moment. There’s going to be more exposition in the posts to come, since explaining how these tours actually work at the business level is something I’m going to reserve for when my impressions get drier and I’m bored of writing about the whole thing anyway.

Pictures are also coming, when I get a chance.

This is a perfect illustration of how my mind is going. I feel like I've definitely written this post already, but for the life of me I can't find any trace of it… in my notebook OR on this site. I probably wrote it once, decided it was far too boring, and scrapped it in favor of the PM post. In any case here it is, reborn in the interest of my laughably incompetent brand of continuity.

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The day's morning feature was a boat ride around West Lake (xi hu / 西湖), which was unexpectedly gorgeous. The weather had just started to clear, and the sun would occasionally peek through the cloud cover to bathe the boat in golden warmth, and ricochet blinding flares off the lake.

I firmly believe that much of China's scenery is best complemented by alternating rain and sunshine. There's something about the willows that inevitably gather around lakes and rivers that is just begging to be rained on, and when sunlight – even the peculiarly sepia, withered sunlight of the more populated urban centers – deigns to play off of the jeweled branches the effect is, in a word, perfect. There aren't many things that can make me just stand around and feel happy, but that combination of mist and light is one of them.

Frustratingly, capturing that atmosphere on film (or a digital sensor) is a feat of skill which has simply proven to be beyond me, even with the $1500 in camera equipment I have lassoed to my body whenever I'm traveling.

So today, I was content to just lean over the railing on our ludicrously pagoda-shaped boat, eyes closed, while sparkling wavelets flung novae through my eyelids and the sun soaked into my bones. Meanwhile, I did my best to ignore both our tour guide's blaring loudspeaker, and the grandmother who slowly but persistently forced me further along the railing in order to get a good shot at a particularly compelling bit of nothing. Through metallic bellows about historically significant stretches of lakeside walkway, and the increasingly insistent elbow at my ribs, there wound a constant thread; a gratifying sense of well-being, which I was determined to enjoy while it lasted.

The boat ride cut across a corner of the lake and deposited us near a parking lot, lasting a charming fifteen minutes or so. We then waited for a rather less enchanting half-hour while our bus made its way through rush-hour traffic toward us. Adults leaned on nearby trees, chatting with unfounded optimism about what might await us at lunch, while their children chased each other aimlessly around the parking lot, occasionally straying into traffic.

Once the bus reached us, we piled on board for a short drive to a Longjing ( long jing / 龙井 ) tea plantation. Longjing green tea, as explained to us by a severe-looking woman in an equally severe navy skirt suit while we sat in a stark white room, is known to be one of the finest teas in the world.

She then held forth at length on the health benefits of green tea, occasionally rapping on the table to get our attention if we were insolent enough speak to each other. It seemed less a sales pitch than a stern talking-to, but sales pitch it was, right down to her trick of "proving" green tea's health benefit.

Our schoolmarm took a handful of uncooked white rice and placed it in a cup with some spirit of iodine and water. Allowing us to note the dark – and therefore quite obviously toxic – color, she then poured in some tea, which cleared the iodine almost instantly and started absorbing the color from the rice.

Despite the gasps and fumbling for credit cards that ensued from my fellow tourists, I remained skeptical – knowing that, you know, iodine is important – merely making a note that I should look up the chemistry involved.

(Nerd alert)

As it turns out… this is one of the very things that can make green tea unhealthy if used to excess. Tea – including green tea – has a high fluoride content. This is suspected to increase in the presence of water and air pollution, of which China famously has no shortage.

As fluoride is a chemical antagonist to iodine, it comes as no surprise that green tea would clear iodine from a glass of water. The thing is, despite the icky color, iodine actually helps with proper thyroid function and prevents diseases like fluorosis, which has actually been linked to heavy tea consumption – and has a curiously high incidence in China.

Not to mention green tea's unusually high concentrations of aluminum, which has been linked to Alzheimer's.

It just seems amusing that what was convincing these people to shell out $110 per pound for green tea was the very thing that might: a) help them forget – along with everything else – how they were fleeced, and b) cripple them in such a way as to prevent them from being able to take their revenge.

Snake oil salesmen haven't gone away; they've just diversified.

Then we went to lunch, which was appropriately terrible.