We Were Almost Entirely Wrong About China

We had a theory about China . We had read things, watched the news, talked to people who had been there . We thought we had a reasonable picture of what to expect . We were wrong. Not a little wrong , almost entirely wrong . This is the first video in a series about 22 days inside China . We traveled privately, just the two of us , with a different local guide in each city . No tour buses, no group schedules , just us moving through one of the most extraordinary countries on earth trying our best to understand it . We are going to show you the landscapes and the food and the things you come to China to see . But we are also going to try to explain something harder . What this country actually is , how it thinks, what it has been through, why it ended up here . Because if you only watch the pretty pictures , you will miss the whole story. . My name is Tresa . That guy you keep seeing on screen exploring everything , sitting in every car, that's my husband, Zarko . Together, we run this channel and together we spent 22 days traveling China privately . We came back with more questions than answers , which honestly is the best possible outcome from any trip . I'm American, born and raised in the US , which means I grew up with a pretty specific picture of the world . Communism was the enemy . The Soviet block was gray and scary . And China was this distant, mysterious place you only heard about when something went wrong . Zarko's story is different . He grew up in Bulgaria under communism . Not reading about it, living it