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21/1/13 - 27/1/13
Guangzhou has been the first destination on my Spring Festival travel itinerary; I've been here for four days so far, with Mary, Tessa, Jony and Hannah and we are all BIG FANS. The weather is lovely: like British summer, except there's no rain and it's actually sunny, so we've been enjoying the novelty of wandering about in T-shirts. And the whole city is just the most relaxed place - all anyone seems to be doing is strolling by the river, or eating. Maybe cooking, maybe roller-blading, but mostly just eating. You can buy coconuts, pineapples or sticks of bamboo to snack on as you wander around, and I've seen my first spring roll since arriving in China! All very exciting.
We arrived on Tuesday morning, dropped our bags off at our (very nice) hostel and headed off to explore, following the biggest road we could find. The highlight of this trip was probably stumbling across a tiny park where an old man was stood in his underpants, casually changing into a fresh set of clothes. The previous occupants had checked out of our room by this point, so we were able to have showers and change out of our travelling clothes before our next excursion. This time we took the ferry across the Pearl River (which is literally 30 seconds from the door of our hostel); it cost the equivalent of 5p and we had the local drunk for company, a little wrinkled old man leading his bike by one hand and clinging to a beer bottle in the other. Here, after another stroll through some pretty, leafy areas, stopping to nosy at buckets of eels etc on sale along the pavement, we found the subway and went to the Chen Clan Folk Art Museum. We were distracted by another park as we left the subway, this one packed with babies and toddlers, and ended up taking a collective nap on the grass before we actually made it inside. The museum is set in a Qing dynasty temple, built to house students preparing for the imperial examinations. It's one of the few sights in my guidebook that's actually the original building; most things seem to be modern rebuilds of things that have been burnt down or destroyed in various revolutions. It was very pretty, absolutely dripping in painted carvings of lions, dragons and buddhas and had several brilliant gift shops. The best of these were mini-galleries, where you could buy souvenirs directly from the artists, who'd be sat at a table giving a demonstration. There was a man painting glass bottles from the inside, another making elaborate paper-cuts and, my favourite, a man painting famous Chinese landscapes using only his hands. He could make trees, rivers, mountains, waterfalls, stone-bridges, birds... all by smudging ink about with his hands. I hung around for ages making a pain of myself: I asked him to demonstrate how he painted pretty much every feature, then I wanted a photo, then I wanted a film of him painting... the artist was really lovely though, and after asking nicely in my best Chinese, gave me nearly 50% off on the painting I wanted, plus two painted bookmarks for free. Yesss! After this, we went back to the park to people watch (aka watch all the cute grandparents being cute with their cute grandchildren).
Wednesday was another relaxed day, this time at Yuexiu Park, an enormous park in the centre of the city. Hannah, Mary, Tessa and I (Jony was ill so stayed at the hostel) hired pedalos to meander about the lakes, spying on all the dates and family day trips going on. Pretty much every child on the lake had been left in charge of steering their pedalos, so there were lots of collisions and pile-ups, particularly under the bridges. The park staff were mid-way through building their Chinese New Year decorations as well, so we boated around the enormous dragon-boat they were building from silk, and an island where they were building a multi-storey silk pagoda. Post-pedalo, we wandered about various gardens in the park, eating ice-creams, and tried out the water ride at their mini-funfair. Finding our way back to a subway system to get home took us much, much longer than it should have; we staggered about the streets of Guangzhou asking for directions for maybe 20 minutes before we were finally on our way back to the hostel. That evening, the four of us hired roller-skates to go along the river. Mary and I were big fans; Tessa and Hannah not so much. Either way, we were all shown up by the local teenagers who would sprint past us, backwards and dancing about, on their skates. Me and Mary skated along the riverside path as far as we could and ended up racing a group of little girls; they were about 9 and they beat us too. They even followed us a little bit of the way back, just to show how much better than us they were at maneuvering the few steps and ramps we encountered. After this, Mary, Hannah and I decided that seeing as our hostel was located on Bar Street, we really ought to do some drinking. Jony was still bed-bound and Tessa didn't fancy it, so the three of us got hideously drunk by ourselves and crashed out of the hostel to spend the night in a karaoke bar called Amigos.
On Thursday we visited Guangxiao Temple, which was very pretty and had a really impressive central hall with an enormous gold (at least, it looked gold) buddha. For some reason, we weren't meant to go in this room so a little Chinese lady came and dragged me out by the elbow when she saw me wandering in. We were also surprised by the number of people praying throughout the temple... and by the monks sat around in full robes playing on their iPhones. Somehow, we spent several hours in this temple: a lot of time was spent sat on the steps, eating cherries and monk-watching, then staring at fish in the temple pond. We would have lingered around all the small trinket shops surrounding the temple, but the hordes of beggars following us from the temple gates, rattling tin bowls in our faces, were a strong enough deterrant to send us speeding back towards the subway.
That Friday we said goodbye to Tessa, who was flying back to England for two weeks. We returned to the Chen Clan Academy so she could buy gifts and souvenirs for people at home, then took her to the airport. Saturday was not the most successful day by any standards. It was too rainy and miserable for sightseeing to be worthwhile, so we decided to be practical instead and go to the train station to book and return various tickets. Except I realised just as we were about to get on the subway that I didn't have my passport; I went back to the hostel to fetch it, meaning to meet the others at the train station (they would go to the bus station to return a ticket whilst I did this). Well, I managed to sort out my subway ticket to the station okay and the journey seemed to go without a hitch, although noone wanted to sit next to me and it was longer than I'd expected. I was a bit confused to find that the station looked nothing like it had when we'd arrived on Tuesday, but it was enormous and I figured I was probably just at the wrong end. Then the others weren't in the ticket office as they'd said, but I thought maybe because it was so big there were two ticket offices and we agreed to meet in McDonalds instead. I set about asking for directions, but everyone kept directing me to the second floor when the others had assured me that McDonalds was directly outside. At first I thought maybe it was my dodgy Chinese leading to the misunderstandings, but no. I'd just gone to the wrong train station. It took me another half hour to get to the right station and that wasn't even the worst part. It turned out I was one day too early to buy the tickets I wanted (in China you can only book train tickets a maximum of 10 days in advance), so the whole thing had been a waste of time anyway. There was a crazy-looking man grinning about by my shoulder throughout this whole conversation, so I speed-walked off to join the others, who were returning more tickets in the next room, as soon as I'd confirmed I couldn't buy the tickets. I'd been in the next room about five minutes when I had one of my have-I-got-my-passport panics, which happen to me about hourly whenever I'm travelling. This time, though, I actually hadn't. Knowing I'd had my passport at the ticket counter only minutes before, I tried not to panic and went back with Jony to look for it. We'd hardly walked through the door before the crazy man from before popped up and pulled my passport out of his pocket. I wasn't sure whether to be relieved he'd returned it or terrified that he'd had it at all, but I took my passport back and said thankyou a bazillion times. He didn't leave though. He was still there, variously chatting and shouting away, when the others joined us a couple of minutes later. And he was still there 10 minutes after that, as we stood waiting for another member of station staff. At first he seemed to want a reward for returning my passport (cue the dumb foreigner act: saying "I don't understand" and smiling apologetically a lot); then he started insulting and laughing at our footwear, inquiring as to how many children we each had, complimenting my nose and various other things. We tried to say goodbye and edge away plenty of times, but he was having none of it and just kept following us about. We asked for help from a security guard stood next to us but after the crazy man ignored his mild attempt to point him in a different direction he just wandered off looking embarrassed. In the end we just gave in and chatted to him until the man we were waiting for returned and we were able to leave.
This brings me pretty much to the end of our time in Guangzhou. Sunday morning was spent packing and buying last-minute snacks (chocolate milk and Kinder Maxi) from our favourite shop, Family Mart, before we met Alice and Jono at the bus station to travel to Sanya.
More soon! xxx
- comments
Jo Good to have you back in print - and now looking forward to seeing the 'hand made' painting you bought. XX
GrN Good to have news of your travels - you'll have such itchy feet when you return home! X