Guangzhou... 广州

Tuesday 23 to Wednesday September 24, 2003

I hate Guangzhou. This place is, as Kathy would politely put it, the armpit of China. I would probably pick a filthier body part that smelled worse...
Gee, you might say, it's just a city. Be open to the cultural experience, that's what traveling is all about, after all. Right? Come to Guangzhou and tell me that. This town has more ways to rip foreigners off than you ever imagined possible. And they enjoy it. The town is dirty, the people are rude, the food is various forms of crappy starch served in bland, dirty tasting sauces, and the prices are 5 times inflated over what they should be.

Last time I was here I had just spent a week in Guilin with Kathy and Bobb, and Bobb and I came back to Guangzhou to attend the bi-annual international trade fair. The only room we could find was the office of a hotel for 450 元 (kuai, or RMB). We slept on the table of the office and had to be out by 8 in the morning. This is about 8 times what it should have cost, and totally over the top.... The fair was a nightmare, the weather sucked, the food sucked and the train station was a mosh pit of ticket scalpers, hustlers, beggars and thieves. And those are just the ones in uniforms.... Once inside the train station, the best summary of the situation was, as Bobb said, "This place smells like ass!" Amen. Here's to Guangzhou...

SO, why are we here? This is where we can get visa's to Vietnam... So you know, in case you need it, the Vietnamese Embassy is on the second floor of the North B tower (above the Bank of China) in the Hotel Landmark Canton, right next to the Jie Fang Da Qiao (Revolution Big Bridge). There are plenty of people outside that are offering to 'change money'. Don't do it. If someone says 'Change Money?' to you, be smart and don't say 'no thanks', or 'not today': say 'F%ck off!'. If you do change money, don't be an idiot like I was.

Idiot story #1: I was trying to help a fellow traveler we'd hooked up with turn some RMB into USD. He wanted to buy a bunch of USD, which you can't just do at the bank if you don't have receipts and a departure ticket. So we found one of the guys that was changing money, and struck a bargain with him on the exchange rate. We went off to a side street and waited for his boss to show up with the money to make the trade. I ended up going back behind a building with the 'boss' guy and making the exchange. It went like this: Here's a bunch of $100 bills, see them? OK, let me count the RMB. Here, I'll wrap up the money in a rubber band for you. Have a nice day. During the rubber band deal, he exchanged the wad of hundreds for a wad with a Benny on the outside and some singles on the inside. We didn't realize it until he'd had plenty of time to split. Lesson one: don't flash money around, lesson two: don't deal with shady characters on side streets. Lesson three: count it every time it hits your hand. Lesson four: don't be an idiot., etc., etc.

I had a bad day.

Anyway,  enough misery crap...

We rode the train down from Shanghai. It was a 24 hour, overnight train. Tickets cost 367元 for the hard sleeper. I like riding the train, and the conditions once you're on the train have improved dramatically. There's air conditioning. For the most part people avoid smoking where they're not supposed to. There's no running water (a.k.a. spit) on the floor, and the carts that come by offer fairly decent food, never mind the need for Imodium the next day. All in all it was a very comfortable ride. I managed to put away a book, Anthony Bourdain's A Cooks Tour. (OK, not great. He's got the arrogant New Yorker thing going on that kinda rubs me the wrong way, and he's homo-phobic, alcoholic, and a chain smoker. If you can get past that, he managed to have some 4 star adventures that he dressed up dramatically that make interesting reads).

Sitting at the window watching China go by. It's like a story. You see the towns, the agriculture, the lives of people in the middle of nowhere. But you don't have a chance to get to know anyone. It's a very surreal experience, sitting on the train, cell phones ringing in your ears, watching people in their fields with water buffalo, or hand irrigating their crops. In the morning, I woke up at around 4:30 or 5 and watched the world whiz by in the dark. The sky slowly lightened, and the monochrome landscape, pocked occasionally by the lone electric light, gave way to color. First the greens of the young rice shoots appeared, and then the lighter yellows and tans of the dried brush and buildings moved away from grey. The slate reflections of landscape in the rivers and lakes lightened, then crisped. Finally, the rich maroon of the iron rich soil showed up as motorcycles and bicycles appeared with people on their way to work. Farmers rolled up their pants and slogged to work in their fields. Children in uniforms walked or rode their bikes to school. Everywhere, China woke up. And though I was traveling past it at 60+ mph, the continuity of the story was amazing. For two hours, it was as if I had a slice of time and a box seat to a show that plays daily, and has for thousands of years. The story is unchanging, though the world has changed around it.

Here's what Kath looks like on the train in the morning...

The View from the train...

(Sorry, had to remove the movie, it's just taking up too much space...)

Again, another bit of Chinglish from the train. The words aren't wrong, I just wonder why "Hot Water" wouldn't do...

Once we got to Guangzhou, we settled in to a hotel near the train station, went to the Vietnamese embassy, hooked up with some other travelers, and went to a park. OK, I don't want to say anything nice about Guangzhou, but it was a lovely park. (Oh yeah, and the subway ROCKS! very cheap, clean and easy) I think the Orchid Garden would've been lovely, but when I commented to one of the gardeners that there weren't really that many flowers, he was kind enough to let me know it wasn't spring. Hmm... go figure, they took my 8 元 anyway. Across from the Orchid Garden is the Yue Xiu Gong Yuan (a big park). We walked around in it for a while, and it was also very nice. There was a sculpture garden with sculpture that depicted various ChengYu that was very interesting. We managed to get a picture of Kathy standing in front of a ChengYu sculpture that is related to her Chinese name, Si Ma Qi. The ChengYu is Si Ma Guang Za Gang. The story is that a bunch of kids were playing, and one fell into a large clay pot. All the other kids were trying to get the kid out of the top of the pot, but they were afraid that the kid would drown. They didn't know what to do. Until along came little Si Ma, with a big rock, and broke the side of the pot to let the drowning kid out. So now, in daily speech, when someone is thinking 'outside the box' we would say that Si Ma Broke the Clay Pot. It means Kath is honored with the name cause it means she's a smartey pants.

The following day we switched hotels. The hotels, restaurants and other facilities surrounding the train station and, subsequently, the Convention Halls, are well practiced in ripping everyone off, and can get the highest prices because of location. So we moved. Initially we went to Shamian Island and were planning on staying there. This is where the Youth Hostel is, as well as numerous other hotels. The island is done up in European style, and is quite quaint, but also rather expensive, it turns out. Our plan was to walk on to the island and strike a deal with one of the many hustlers guaranteed to be there with a handful of hotel pamphlets. This is what ended up happening, although we got to a taxi, and ended up heading off the island. I started complaining about how far it was from the island (like I care), and the price came down. Then we ended up with a room that had two beds instead of one, and we were really after one with a double bed. So the one with the double bed didn't have a window and therefore no view. The hustler had promised a view, so the price came down again. We ended up in a double with AC and a private bath for 110 元 a night for two nights. The hotel was the Xin Hua Da Jiu Dian on the corner of Ren Min Nan Lu and Yan Jian Xi Lu. The office was NOT at the front desk, the guy the hustler took us to had an office on the 6th floor, room 616. Whatever, they can work their own deals, it didn't seem to be a problem. The only problem with the location of the hotel was that it wasn't right on a subway line. The #1 train was not terribly far away though, in the direction of the Hotel Landmark Canton. Comparatively, the Youth Hostel had dorm beds with shared bath (8 to a room) for 50元 a person.

Here's how we locked the door in our hotel. It's got a deadbolt, but I don't know that somebody doesn't have a key, and I just don't trust it. Something about getting ripped off repeatedly makes me a bit paranoid. What you see is the closed front door on the left, with a chair wedging it shut against the opened bathroom door.

Spaz also hates Guangzhou. Here he is commenting on the ugly 'waterfront' of the Yan river. That's his dark spot he's standing proudly in front of...

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