Guangzhou

While reading Lost on Planet China I came upon a section about boarding trains in China. J. Maarten Troost, the author of Lost on Planet China, described his experience as a new and inexperienced zookeeper might describe feeding wild tigers and monkeys. Hoards of people elbowed and shoved there way to the front of the train platform. Once the train arrived people scrambled over each other to obtain seats. While Troost tried to board, he glanced at the woman next to him, and realized that her seat number was the same as his. Once on the train Troost’s only seating option was a hard piece of floor between two chairs. The men around him chain smoked and screamed at each other in Chinese.

After reading this frightening (but hilarious) account, I prepared myself for the train ride to Guangzhou. After much wandering about the train station and many mind-numbing conversations in Chinese we bought five express tickets on the 7050 train to Guangzhou.

The train ride proved mostly uneventful. No sharp elbows driven into my ribs. No three foot grandmothers pushing their way past me to the front of the line. The most exiting thing that happened was the explosion of my seltzer over a five-foot radius around me. Sadly, this five-foot radius included Kif, Stirling, Isabel, Jacek, the woman sitting in front of me, the 5-year-old boy sleeping on the lap of the woman in front of me, the woman in a short green dress next to the sleeping child, and the woman staring out the window at the passing farms.

Once the train arrived, we climbed off and were pulled through a dimly lit tunnel by a stream of people into the bright sunlight of Guangzhou. We surfaced, wandered about in the blazing sun, then dove back into the ground. The underground world of China is quite astonishing. Underground life seems about as lively as the world above. Tables staked with cheap ceramic cups and plates lined one side of the metro tunnel, while on the other side jeans and t-shirts hung up. Men and women shuffled by sipping tea and munching chicken feet with rice. Restaurants, moon cake shops and shoe stores filled the underground metro tunnels. After maneuvering through the groups of shoppers, sellers and travelers, we bought green metro chips and descended another level to the metro platforms.

We climbed up the steps of our metro station destination and were greeted by the familiar and repulsive grin of Ronald McDonald. After glancing past the golden arches down a street lined with trees and trash we turned to find a much more inviting sight, our hotel. A marble doorway with “China Hotel” engraved above it stood not three feet away from us.

After dropping our bags off at the China Hotel we ventured out into the streets of Guangzhou in search of a Cantonese flavored lunch. What we found was a “South Ocean Seafood Village” which was in fact an incredibly nice dim sum restaurant. We ate our fill of crunchy greens and sea urchin roe then visited a nearby park.

At the park we increased our “qi” on colorful metal machines, observed multiple ping pong games, pedaled a boat across a lake, watched wedding photos being taken, and witnessed a child catch an incredibly small silver fish with a bit of string.

Our first day in Guangzhou was quite a success, including explosions, strange and delicious food, fortification of personal qi, and swift travel.