Guangzhou

Hey!

So, here's another story that I didn't get the chance to write about-my day in Guangzhou.

The day didn't begin very well-I was almost 40 minutes late meeting my friend at Kowloon Tong station. After my reprehensible tardiness, we headed straight for the border crossing. The main HK-China boundary crossing is at Lo Wu (Luo Hu in Mandarin). The MTR takes you right there, and then you walk across a bridge over the Shenzhen river and cross Chinese customs, which didn't take too long. Once you cross the border, you're in Shenzhen. Having already seen Shenzhen, we headed right for the train station, which is conveniently located immediately adjacent to the border.

I need to stop here to point out how amazed I always am at the big difference as soon as you cross the boundary-it's hard to describe, but in some ways its more noticeable than the difference between Hong Kong and Canada.

Anyway, we got on the next high-speed train-80 Yuan (15 Dollars) for a one-way ticket, and it only took an hour (cheaper than going by the MTR train, if you're considering it). The train was nice, not at all what I'd been led to expect (to be honest, I found myself wishing that it was a little less upscale!). It was also pretty quick, and it was interesting to notice how the train never really left built-up areas on the whole journey (even more interesting was watching the two guys in front of us say, surprised "laowai! (foreigner!)" when they sat down, and occasionally look back at me curiously. I definitely regret not having tried to speak to them in Mandarin, it probably would have been interesting).

Once in Guangzhou, we took the subway to the area near a temple. As soon as we got outside, you could see the difference from Hong Kong. The streets were lined with short, quaint buildings, and nice little trees. There were lots of people pushing carts and selling everything from food to flowers. Sadly, there were also lots of people begging on the streets near the temple (and all the temples we saw in Guangzhou). We headed straight in to the temple (there was a 5 Yuan (70 cent)  charge), which was quite beautiful. The temple was a sprawling complex, with many buildings, trees, and people. There were many statues which looked to have been damaged, but there were also many beautiful old buildings and features (some almost a thousand years old!) .

The temple was beautiful, but after checking out every detail, we were both starving. I'd written down the name of a restaurant recommended by wikitravel right next to the temple, but when we went into the place, the prices seemed a little too high. Instead, we wound up at a little Qinghai (青海）noodle place, where we had what may be the cheapest meal I've ever eaten-8 Yuan (1.20 CAD). An interesting cultural note here-the streets in front of the temple were lined with barrels for burning offerings to one's ancestors. Offerings are paper pictures of items, and tradition says that when they're burned, they go to ancestors in the afterlife.

We next walked along the streets to a beautiful old mosque (we later discovered that this may be one of the world's oldest mosques). However, the imam would not let us enter, even when we tried speaking Arabic, and so we continued on. Next, on our way to another temple, we stopped at some tea shops. We saw lots of little shops, tiny little shops, filled with tea sold in every imaginable packaging. We stopped at two, where I bought tea, and a nice little decorative tea set for 18 Yuan (2 dollars). Another cultural note is that Guangzhou is actually the traditional home of Cantonese (Guangzhou's English name was Canton, which is where the name of the language comes from in English). Although there are many migrant workers from other parts of China who only speak Mandarin, there were still many stores, including these tea shops, where they spoke Cantonese, and where I could interact a little more with the people.

After the tea, and heading into some Tibetan Buddhist shops, we checked out another amazing temple-the six banyan trees temple, which was very similar to the first. We noticed one odd thing-many offerings placed next to statues included packages of bottled drinks. After this, we got a little lost wandering through to try to find a museum (which turned out to not yet be open). That's not so bad though-Guangzhou has lovely little streets, and it was really interesting to see the little shops selling random electronic parts (think, one shop just for light switches) throughout the city.

The museum not yet being open, we headed to Beijing road. A main shopping street (where we ducked into a bookstore and grabbed some street food snacks), there was a section under glass displaying the older sections of the road (it's been a main street for hundreds of years). We followed it to the river, the Pearl river, which is an important feature of the region, before heading to the metro to leave. Having arrived at Guangzhou East station, we decided to leave from the main station. The station was a little different-filled with poor people, people selling food etc. We had trouble getting tickets-for some reason, the lady sold us tickets not for the next available train, but a random one several trains later. We did manage to hop on an earlier train though.

We hit a minor snag in Shenzhen-you had to scan your ticket on the gates when exiting, but I lost mine. I wound up standing in Shenzhen train station, emptying out all of my possessions onto the ground-money, passport, everything-but eventually the staff just let me through. By this point we were starving, so we headed to a restaurant in the Lowu border mall before heading back to HK.


Guangzhou? Loved it! 'Nuff said.