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Globetrotters

We are a group of ordinary yet extraordinary travel lovers sharing our experiences of exploring the world with the world.

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TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE

I Spent 2 Weeks in China. I Won’t Be Back.

My honest experience visiting a country I desperately wanted to love

9 min readAug 3, 2026

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A colourful Chinese temple with trees and a blue sky.
A Chinese temple — I thought it was very pretty / Photo taken by the author

China had been on my bucket list for years. It was a country that was completely different to any I’d been to before. I’d never been to Asia, and growing up I loved watching YouTubers wander through Tokyo, Osaka, Beijing and Shanghai, showing off vending machines selling everything imaginable, impossibly fast bullet trains, robots serving food, futuristic toilets, towering skylines filled with neon lights and streets that looked like they belonged fifty years in the future.

In my mind, China was the future. I pictured bright, billboard-filled skylines, lightning-fast trains gliding silently between cities, breathtaking mountain scenery dotted with ancient temples, and a country that perfectly balanced thousands of years of history with cutting-edge technology.

I really did want to love it. In fact, more than that, I expected to.

Then I spent two weeks there and left wondering whether we’d visited the same country I’d spent years dreaming about.

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An Irish writer sharing my thoughts on productivity, travel, and personal growth - while still working it all out myself.

Globetrotters
Globetrotters

Published in Globetrotters

We are a group of ordinary yet extraordinary travel lovers sharing our experiences of exploring the world with the world.