The Breakfast Revelation
I arrived in Shanghai on a Tuesday morning with the kind of jet lag that makes you question your entire life's choices. My hotel in Jing'an was fine—fine being the kiss of death for a travel writer—and I needed to remember why I'd flown sixteen hours to be here in the first place.
The answer arrived at 6 a.m. in the form of my guide, Weimin, who'd agreed to take me on the Shanghai Breakfast Walking Tour of Former French Concession Shanghai Breakfast Walking Tour of Former French Concession. I'm not usually one for curated walking tours; they feel choreographed, safe, predictable. But Weimin had other ideas.
We started on a quiet tree-lined lane in the southern pocket of the concession, where the apartment buildings still wore their belle époque bones beneath decades of laundry and air-conditioning units. A vendor was steaming baskets of sheng jian bao at 6:15 a.m., and Weimin ordered four without asking what I wanted. "Trust me," he said, which is what good guides always say, and which always means something life-changing is about to happen.
The dumpling was still warm, the pork inside almost impossibly juicy, the sesame-studded bottom burnt to an ideal shattering crunch. I've eaten sheng jian bao in four countries. This one made me reconsider my entire dumpling hierarchy.
We walked for three hours. Fifteen breakfast stops. Xiao long bao served in baskets so thin the broth inside seemed impossible—like the dumpling maker had trapped clouds in a rice-flour envelope. Jianbing crepes rolled with egg and scallion and crispy wonton bits. Youtiao that still had the warmth of the wok. A small bowl of congee with a century egg that tasted of iron and ocean and time itself.
By the end, I wasn't just fed. I was converted. This was travel at the pace food demands to be properly understood—not wolfed between destinations, but savoured on the streets where it's meant to be eaten, while the morning light was still soft and the vendors were still chatting with regulars and the city hadn't yet accelerated into its daytime frenzy.
The Bullet Train Gambit
Three days later, I was sitting in the Shanghai Maglev station, wondering if I'd made a terrible mistake.
I'd booked the Beijing to Xi'an See Terracotta Warriors with Bullet Train Round Trip Transfer Beijing to Xi'an See Terracotta Warriors with Bullet Train Round Trip Transfer partly out of logistical necessity and partly because I'd convinced myself that a day trip to see one of the world's most staggering archaeological sites would somehow feel more authentic if I did it fast. (This is the kind of thinking that travel writers specialise in. It is rarely correct.)
The guide, a university student named Marco who was supplementing his tuition fees, collected me from my Beijing hotel at dawn. The drive to the station was silent except for the hiss of traffic. I sipped terrible instant coffee from a 7-Eleven and wondered why I wasn't still in Shanghai eating breakfast.
But then the bullet train pulled into the platform, and suddenly I understood China's relationship with speed. This wasn't about rushing; it was about dignity. About moving through space with such precision and comfort that you didn't feel hurried, just efficient. The train was immaculate. My seat reclined. A woman walked through selling fresh noodles and tea. I ate and watched the Chinese countryside blur past the window—flat agricultural fields giving way to mountains, all of it moving beneath me at 300 kilometres per hour.
Xi'an appeared like a mirage. Marco had arranged a car. We drove straight to the Terracotta Army, and yes, okay, I'd seen the photos. Everyone has. But photographs lie. They lie about scale, about the way eight thousand soldiers seem to stare at you simultaneously, about the casual genius of ancient people making individual warriors with individual faces rather than mass-producing clones.
We had perhaps three hours there. It felt rushed. It probably was rushed. And yet Marco was kind enough to let me sit quietly in the museum café afterwards, processing what I'd seen, drinking tea that tasted faintly of smoke.
Into the Stone Forest
But the real magic happened later, after I'd returned to Beijing and collected myself and decided that I couldn't write about China without understanding its geological drama.
Zhangjiajie required a different approach. I booked the 1-Day Private Tour to ZJJ National Forest Park & Avatar Mountain 1-Day Private Tour to ZJJ National Forest Park & Avatar Mountain, which meant a smaller group, a driver named Mrs. Huang who'd been navigating these roads for two decades, and a hiker named Dao who moved through the sandstone peaks with the unselfconscious grace of someone who'd walked them ten thousand times.
The morning was misty. Everything was misty. The peaks emerged from the fog like the world was being created in real time, like we were witnessing the moment when Pandora first became visible. I understand now why James Cameron came here. The landscape operates at a frequency that regular mountains don't. The cliffs are vertical in a way that feels geologically impatient.
Dao took us on a trail that wound between peaks, sometimes so narrow you had to squeeze through stone passages. My thighs burned. My camera battery died. I stopped taking photos and started simply watching, which is rarer and better.
We ate a lunch of stir-fried vegetables and rice that Mrs. Huang had packed in thermoses. We sat on a ledge overlooking a valley that disappeared into white mist. A group of Chinese tourists rushed past us, stopping every ten seconds for selfies. Dao gave me a look that said: this is why slow travel matters.
The Discipline of Ink
Back in Beijing, I had one more unexpected stop scheduled. I'd booked the Noon Calligraphy Class Noon Calligraphy Class partly out of curiosity and partly because I'd been told by other writers that watching someone work with ink and brush reveals something about how a culture moves through the world.
The class was in a small studio in a hutong, with north-facing light and walls lined with examples of every style. My teacher, Old Mr. Wang, was seventy-three years old and didn't speak English. We communicated through gesture and one phrase his daughter had taught him: "Slow down more."
He showed me how to hold the brush—not like a pen, but balanced between your fingers as if you were holding a bird that might fly away if you gripped too hard. He showed me the correct angle, the pressure point, the way the ink should flow like blood from a creature that was both living and already dead.
I spent an hour drawing the character for "water" over and over. I was terrible at it. My lines shook. My proportions were wrong. But somewhere in the fortieth iteration, I felt my body relax into it. My mind stopped narrating and started observing. This, I think, is what he meant by "slow down more." Not the speed of the brush, but the speed of everything else.
When I left, he gave me a piece of calligraphy he'd done—the character for "travel." It's hanging in my studio in São Paulo now, and every time I look at it, I remember the sound of the brush on rice paper, and the taste of xiao long bao still warm in my mouth, and the way those terracotta soldiers looked at infinity, and the mist rising off sandstone peaks that inspired a billion-dollar film.
China doesn't demand to be rushed through. It just demands to be felt.
