Guangzhou!

No one ever told me about it! I expected it to be another charmless, polluted, sprawling Chinese city. I expected to blow through it in a day and head onwards to the more glamorous and European Macau, but here I remain. This city is amazing! Why didn't I come here to live and study Chinese? Oh, because they all speak Cantonese here. Well I guess I will just have to be contented with visiting and struggling through even more broken Chinese conversations than usual.

The city is sprawling, that's for sure. It doesn't have the same centered feel like Kunming, but it has other charms. The architecture, for one. Guangdong as a province has historically had the most interaction with the west and the capital shows that. There are parts of the city where I am not sure if I'm in China or London. Shamian Island, a small island in the southern part of the city, was owned by the British for several years and is now overrun by foreigners. It is peaceful with small, car-less streets, a park where old men and women play chess and practice tai chi, playgrounds, and a few western restaurants, and lots of Western couples pushing strollers with their newly adopted Chinese babies in them.

Beyond European Shamian Island, the rest of Guangzhou is a mix between sparklingly new modern city and old Canton. The weather is hot and humid and there are palm trees and similar foliage everywhere making it feel a bit like Hong Kong, but without all the cramped together tall buildings. This city even has a 4-line metro (more than Beijing can boast) and western venues such as Starbucks. Everything is just massive in this city-the buildings feel like huge, sparkling giants, and it goes on forever. I looked up the population of Guangzhou and was floored to find that it only has 3.24 million - half a million LESS than Kunming. What?? Kunming isn't a poor city by any means, but it certainly isn't a business city like Guangzhou. Business men from the west who tell me they do tons of business in China haven't even heard of Kunming. Guangzhou, on the other hand, has hoards of foreign business flying its way and that's the only way that I can explain how huge and modern it feels in comparison.

Wednesday evening I arrived in Guangzhou's airport (massive, clean, and modern - my first taste of what was to come) and found a bus into the city. I made my way to a hostel on Shamian Island where I met another gap year student from England named Jake and we went off to find food together. Just over the bridge from the island we found old Canton with cramped dirty streets, restaurants and food markets selling every type of meet on each corner, and an overall very Chinese feel. We have no idea what we ate for dinner. We had three dishes-one of which we are pretty certain was very very spicy beef. Another was tie ban (sizzling platter) of something from the sea, but what it was and what part of the body it came from remains a mystery. The last dish was something round and potentially meet on top of bokchoi. It was all delicious. After a stop back at the hostel, we were joined by Chris from Sweden and we took the ferry to an area that was meant to be the equivalent to the main expat drinking area in Hong Kong. It...wasn't, in short, and we wound up sitting at a restaurant for hours drinking beer before calling it a night.

My second day in Guangzhou was a bit more eventful. I went with Jake and a different Chris (this one is from Hong Kong) to "University Town" - a massive island in south east Guangzhou with some 15 universities built on it. The place was still under construction, but functioning. It was so depressing. There were no trees or bushes what so ever. The buildings were absolutely massive and very spread out. The streets were too wide and eerily car-less. It was an expanse of dry, hot cement. We took a bus around and it felt as big as Hong Kong Island, almost. And it was ugly. I have never seen anything quite like it. I thought fondly of Princeton's beautiful campus and felt a new sense of appreciation.

Other activities of the day included seeing a massive and deserted shopping mall complete with an ice skating rink and a whole floor of games and arcades that no one was using. We also went to the famous 98 hectare Yue Xiu Gong Yuan (a public park) in the center of the city, complete with a museum and a "beautiful and intelligent waterfall". It actually was quite beautiful. I have to say, I've been really impressed with some of China's public parks.

I am sticking around for one more day before taking the train to Hong Kong to see a friend and then a boat to Macau for a few days. From there, the plan is a night bus to Xiamen, but we'll see what adventures await.

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