Guangzhou was one of the first places opened up to foreign
investment under Deng following his rise to power after the death of Mao. It's
the third largest city in China, and it's just a province away from where I was
for four months. With all of that, it would make sense that I would have thought
to have gone there as soon as I got to Linchuan, but I didn't, because I'm
stupid. Actually, our original plan for the school non-holiday that is Sports
Weekend was for all of us to retreat to the tropical island of Hainan for a
relaxing four days of beaches and locally produced rum. This fell through
thanks to the oddly difficult task of actually getting to Hainan, which has
less than optimal access for a tourist destination, unless you're already in
south China. Instead, our group fractured. Vang went off to visit Ish in
Taiyuan, and Kao decided to go back to Beijing to shop, which left me and Miles
with a lot of time off and nothing to really do with it. I started doing
research, and Guangzhou managed to hit the sweet spot of being interesting, metropolitan,
and easy to access. I floated the idea to Miles, and he agreed, showing more
enthusiasm for a hill than any rational person should (more about that later),
and we were off.
Boarding the bus to the train station in Nanchang, we were
met with a surprise. Just the week before we had met up with the other teachers
in Fuzhou for the first time, and two of them just happened to be on the bus
with us. As it turns out, Nic and Chris were going to the Wal-Mart and Metro to
get western food (read: cheese), and we wound up tagging along with them to
Wal-Mart as a time killing activity while we waited for our night train.
We arrived at the Wal-Mart, and went up four floors of
escalators. They put them on top of buildings here, but that’s only one
difference. When I was in Beijing I
wrote about how my brain rejects things that try to be western and just miss
the mark by a little bit. Most of Wal-Mart doesn't do this to me. The products
are obviously Chinese, the store feels different, and the whole presentation
feels more like a market than the standardized Wal-Mart experience that exists
in America. For example, I could get live carp and chicken feet in Wal-Mart and
haggle about prices if I’m feeling tacky. In Minnesota, that would not fly.
However, there is one thing that messed with my head when I first entered. The
signage is all the same as it is in America, and when I see numbers like 200
over a pile of jeans and t-shirts, my mind reels as it attempts to parse it as
dollars. However, you can get things like breakfast cereal, ham, and not-awful
bread, so I am perfectly fine with going to the Chinese Wal-Mart. The Metro is
actually better, but it's harder to get to, and functions like a Sam’s Club, so
you kind of have to rely on the kindness of members, or wade through paperwork
to get your cheese and grains.
But I digress. We hung out with Nic and Chris until we had
to catch a $2 cab to the train station. We bought cheap beer and hopped onto a
train, praying that we weren't in the same berth as a family. Families always
mean you're going to lose your lower bunk, no matter how adamantly you pretend
that you don't understand what they're trying to ask. Wo ting bu dong only goes so far when you're in the struggle for
the coveted lower bunk. Fortunately for us, that wasn't a problem, as it was
middle-aged men and chicken bits as far as the eye could see. Soon the train
was off, and we were on our way to Guangzhou.
Riding a Chinese train is like living in a small Chinese
town: the locals don't expect you to be there, so when they see you, you're
instantly the object of their attention. This apparently goes double if you're
two white dudes playing Xiangqi, the Chinese version of chess. When we sat down
in the nearly empty seated portion of the train, after being denied seating for
completely mystifying reasons in the dining car, we attracted the attention of
everyone who walked past, and in an odd display of order, each person who took
notice of us sat down on a side of the table and started feeding either me or
Miles with very pushy advice in varying levels of English. Pretty soon it
wasn't a match between the two of us, but a team effort between strangers with
two laowai as figureheads for the match. We had some laughs, learned that we
were using a piece completely wrong, and met a policeman with excellent English
who was as delighted to talk to us as we were to talk to him. After several
matches that we exerted very little influence on, we excused ourselves and went
to bed. I spent most of the night trying to ignore the snoring man in the bunk
next to me and the child that was apparently digging through the wall between
our berths. It was not a restful night.
Upon exiting the Guangzhou East railroad station, I was met
with the sudden realization that I had improperly prepared myself for my trip.
See, Jiangxi province in November is pretty warm, and most certainly warmer
than Minnesota in the fall, but it's not balmy by any means. Guangzhou is, even in late autumn. I cursed the
fact that I didn't pack shorts, and Miles and I tried to find our hostel.
Finding the hostel proved to be a far more difficult task
than either of us thought it would be, and it was most certainly a difficult
task after getting very little sleep. As far as I can tell, the owner of the
hostel loves riddles, and decided that hiding his hostel was the best way to
meet other riddle enthusiasts. The website for the hostel gave us an address
and a phone number, and like a moron I wrote down the address, but not the phone
number, assuming I wouldn't have a phone. Following the address to the best of
our abilities put us on a corner that had a surprisingly large number of pet
care shops. This was obviously not the place, and thankfully we realized that
the address was followed by 27F, which when we looked to the sky, we realized
that probably meant that it was on the 27th floor. We scanned the numbers of all
of the buildings on the block, which was no easy task, and found the building
number we were looking for nestled in the middle of the block next to what
seemed to be a kindergarten. Then the second riddle began. The door to the
building was very much locked, and the guard was very much asleep. I remembered
that the phone number existed, and that Miles had a phone, but his phone was
out of minutes from his stalker texting him. That situation was quickly
resolved, but getting the number wasn't.
As you're probably aware, the Chinese government likes to
keep a pretty tight leash on internet use in the country, the most famous example
of which is the Great Firewall. There are other smaller quirks of this system
of control, like the difficulty of Wi-Fi access at restaurants and other such
places. Take McDonald's as an example. McDonald's says it has free Wi-Fi, and that's
true to a point. However, in order to get this access you have to have a phone
so that you can play a weird ping-pong game of data entry and text messages to
confirm your identity to get access. I had never had that ability, as I didn't
have a phone. However, with Miles in tow we were able to decipher this whole
mess and find the hostel's phone number. Success! We were let in by the now
awake security guard (which I suppose negated the whole ordeal), and rode the
elevator up to the top of the building. We thought the adventure was over, but
it wasn't. We were met with a series of hallways and unmarked doors, and soon
figured out that the 27F on the address meant the 27th floor, door F. The shame of our lack
of understanding was quickly washed away by a semi-warm shower with a head that
was too low for our western bodies, and with hope in our hearts we wandered out
into the bright, humid metropolis of Guangzhou.
One of the first things that Miles and I noticed about
Guangzhou was how orderly everything was compared to anywhere else we'd been in
China until that point. The streets were clean, traffic was orderly and seemed
to behave like the traffic we were used to in the west, and any kind of
jaywalking was frowned upon. We later discovered why this was the case when we
encountered a billboard for a campaign that claimed to be civilizing Guangzhou
by encouraging the use of simple, polite phrases like “Sorry” and “Thank you”.
Social control is done through very obvious channels in Guangzhou, but it seems
to be working, and it did make us feel like we weren't really in China anymore,
so good on you, People’s Government of Guangzhou.
We spent our first day in Guangzhou the same way that I
spend my first day in any city; we picked a direction and walked that way.
Guangzhou is a lot like any other Chinese city in that it’s a forest of high
rise buildings that make it very hard for you to get your bearings inside of
the city, so we navigated by either picking a building and going to it or just
walking down a street. We decided to walk to a building that we saw when we
were leaving the train station, and then head south through a park. The park
turned out to be an athletic complex with an honest-to-god baseball field. I
might have squealed a bit when running to watch Chinese baseball players run
warmups. Unfortunately there weren't any games while we were in town, so I
missed my opportunity to force the wave and heckling on unsuspecting Chinese
crowds. We wandered out of the complex through what seemed to be an expo of
local goods, but just looked like any other market in China. It was all
pleather and odd nuts in the middle of an athletic complex, which is an odd
place to put something like that. We bought nothing, and our presence attracted
no attention. It was wonderful.
We stopped into a mall for lunch and much needed coffee,
and wandered the stores for a bit. The Chinese build malls that make me feel
under-dressed, and this one happened to have a skating rink and full aquarium.
Yeah, I know that the Mall of America has those things, but I also don't feel
like a schmuck wearing dirty jeans there. We emerged and continued our journey
south, compelled to do so by a strange tower in the distance. This quest for
the tower led us to the heart of Guangzhou, although locals might disagree with
that claim.
With the exception of Beijing, every Chinese city I've been
in feels like some kind of projection of the future. Shanghai seems like what
the mid to late 80's thought the future would be, Hong Kong is eerily similar
to Blade Runner, and the park we found ourselves in on that first day in
Guangzhou is sleek and stylish, like if Johnathon Ive designed a downtown. Each
building had its own design, and yet the whole thing felt unified in a way. It
was obviously a new development, as a couple of the buildings weren't open yet,
but that made it cooler. Just picture a big park with symmetric paths around a
pond full of LED lights flanked by big, sleek skyscrapers with a big, twisting
tower at the end right on the river. Also, the tower lights up like the tunnel
at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey at night.
We took a creepy, empty subway ride back to the hostel, and
it proved to be a pretty nice introduction to the confusing mess that is the
Guangzhou metro system. I'm jumping ahead chronologically here, but line one of
the Guangzhou metro features a completely baffling system wherein you are
required to transfer from line one to line one, and just kind of pray that you
don't find yourself on a completely different metro line like I did. Granted, I
wasn't paying the closest of attention at the time, but I think it's pretty
reasonable to assume that if you're on a subway line, and every map that you
can find says that the line will keep going, that you won't be forced to
transfer to the same line. I mean, if I hit the end of the line, I transfer to
the next line, as I am obviously not at the destination that I had intended.
This shouldn't mean that I end up in the wrong part of town, confused and
separated from my traveling partner. Good work, subway planners!
Anyway, we went back to the hostel without incident and
decided that nap time was in order. Miles slept like a log, and I did not. But
this turned out to be a good thing, as it led me to meet an excellent companion
on our journey through Guangzhou, Jimmy. I met Jimmy when I was screwing around
on my phone, enjoying the Wi-Fi at the hostel and trying to find somewhere to
go that night. His American accent was so spot-on that I fully believed that he
was an American for the first ten minutes that we were talking to each other,
until he mentioned he was from Guangzhou. We later discovered his secret:
Stephen Colbert. See, Jimmy was an English major in college, and like almost
every Chinese English student, his listening and speaking were lacking compared
to his written English, so he employed a method that seems to be fairly widely
used in China. What he would do is download episodes of an American TV show
with subtitles, and after every line he would pause the episode and repeat the
line back the way it had been said. Most people use Friends or The Big Bang
Theory, but Jimmy took to the Colbert Report. Years of this left him with a
nearly perfect accent and a pretty strong grasp on American politics. Plus, he
was a stand-up dude that proved to be super helpful. We invited him out to
enjoy Filipino cover bands with us that night.
The moral of that first night in Guangzhou is that Filipino
cover bands are weird. Before I came to Guangzhou I was strongly of the opinion
that crappy live music is preferable to a DJ, but after the first bar we were
in, I'm not really sure. The first warning sign should have been that the band
arrived fifteen minutes before they were supposed to play. This is just bad
form, as it means that you're not going to sound-check at all. The second
warning was that they were a rock band without amps. Their cords went from
their pedal boards directly into the mixing board, which is a huge rock and
roll no-no, because it makes your tone suck completely. Both of these things I
simply attributed to being the Chinese way, and didn't worry about as I watched
them set up. But then they started playing, and if you've never watched a
middle-aged Filipino man belt out a Guns and Roses cover with a backing band
that sounds like an early 60's garage band, then you have never been to a bad
show. We quickly downed our Carlsbergs and exited the establishment.
Did we go back to our hostel and call it a night? Hell no!
We wandered into the next bar we found, which was German themed. Did that mean
there was an Indonesian polka band? Hell no! Instead, there was another
Filipino cover band. However, unlike the weird faux-rock of the previous bar,
this was a man and a woman doing the smooth hits of the 80's on a keyboard with
a backing track. They were fantastic in their complete lack of showmanship, and
I knew every song. At one point they tried to get me to come up and dance to a
Hall and Oates song, but I refused, as I thought dancing in an empty bar was
beneath me. I kind of wish I would have done it now. This being a German bar,
we bought Jimmy his first pretzel ever, enjoyed the set and went back to the
hostel. I was in bed by midnight following a night out on the town. China is
weird.
One of the big advantages of traveling with Miles is that
he is nearly the opposite of me in his travel philosophy. When I go to a city,
I don't really look things up before I go; I just arrive and let things to do
find me. I've been pretty successful in this way, and it's something that I
think I'll stick with in the future. Miles is the opposite. From the first
moment that he decided to go to Guangzhou, he was on the Internet researching
potential attractions and things to do. After a lot of internal deliberation,
he whittled the list down to three major things to do during our three days in
Guangzhou: Yuexiu Park, Chimelong Safari Park, and Lianhuashan (Lotus Hill).
This was great, as it gave us direction in our days and got us to some places
that we wouldn't have otherwise gotten to. That second day's destination was
Yuexiu Park, home to the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall and that goat statue that you
see on anything related to Guangzhou.
Yuexiu is really just a big, densely-wooded park smack dab
in the middle of Guangzhou. I've never been to New York City, but I'd imagine
that it feels kind of like Central Park does. At some points you could believe
that you were out in the woods somewhere in south China, until there's a break
in the trees and you realize that you're in the middle of a bustling city. It's
also a park, so there's not a whole lot to say about it, outside of a couple of
notes.
Our trip to Yuexiu Park is proof that you can be in a city
of over 20 million people and still stick out by being foreign. We had at least
three groups take photos with us, all of them just delighted by the concept.
It's an urge that I'll never understand, as when I put myself in their shoes in
America I just think “Oh, a foreigner”, not “I want a photo with that”.
However, every group that wanted photos was young, and that might have
something to do with it. Either way, Miles and I got a couple of awesome photos
from the experience, and I ran into one of the groups on the subway back to the
hostel, and they paid no mind to me, and it felt super odd to be as disposable
of a physical thing as that. One photo and I disappear.
I feel as though I should offer up some sort of explanation
to the goat statue that I mentioned. It serves as the centerpiece to Yuexiu
Park, and it's one of those things that you can't go to the park and not see,
so it's worth discussing. It's a big statue of a goat and its kids, and it's
related to the creation myth for the city of Guangzhou. I've never been certain
of the actual myth, but a Chinese travel website has this to say “It is said
that a long time ago, there were five supermen lived above the Southern Sea of
China. One day, they ridden to Guang Zhou on five colorful goats, each goat had
ears of rice in mouth. The supermen left the ears of rice for the local people
and prayed the city would never get famine. The five goats they left became
stone later and the city were named Goat City since then.” So there you have
it. Think of it like Romulus and Remus, but with goats.
Miles decided to go to a museum, and I passed, deciding
instead to put on my headphones and aimlessly wander the park. After a couple
hours of wandering, and another very difficult experience with the Guangzhou
metro (Why wouldn't you mark an exit as an exit?), I found myself back at the
hostel, where I decided to take a nap and wait for Miles to show up.
This brings me to food. I know that I've mentioned before
that food in China is very regional, with the standards for dishes varying
wildly from province to province. There's a proverb comparing the spice
preferences for Jiangxi, Sichuan and Hubei provinces (All of them like spice),
that demonstrates this: 四川人 不怕辣，江西人辣不怕，湖南人怕不辣 (Sichuan ren bu pa la; Hunan ren la bu pa; Jiangxi ren pa
bu la). Roughly translated: The Sichuanese are not afraid of spicy food. Those
from Hunan, of spicy food they are not afraid. People from Jiangxi are afraid
the food won't be spicy enough. The point of me pointing out this phrase is
two-fold. For one, it’s a great example of Chinese being a super confusing
language. For two, it demonstrates that I had been eating super spicy food for
the last two months, and that fact didn't really vibe with my high-northern
latitude taste buds. However, this is not the case in Guangdong province.
When you get Chinese food in America, you're generally
getting Cantonese food. The city of Guangzhou used to be known in the west as
Canton. Put these two together and what do you get? You can get American-style
Chinese food in Guangzhou. “Hell yes!” I thought. “I'm going to go get me some
sesame chicken.” I quickly convinced Miles that this was our dinner plan for
the night, and we headed off with Jimmy to a restaurant. They didn't have
sesame chicken, but I did get a big plate of beef and mushrooms that tasted
exactly like it would have at the China Restaurant in central Minnesota. It was
glorious.
That night was also Saturday night, and being the
red-blooded American males that we were, we decided to go out and enjoy a night
on the town that didn't involve Filipino cover bands. The plan was to go to a
one-year anniversary party for a club. Now, I'm a fan of bars that tend to be
more dive-y, and Miles more or less doesn't get out at all, so why go to a big
club full of shit music and probably really douchey dudes? Well, the thing
about Chinese clubs is that they all tend to be decadent in one way or another
and this one just happened to have an indoor pool. How can you pass up that
kind of thing? As it turns out, you can easily pass up that kind of thing if
you physically pass up the club, and can’t find it once you do.
I dropped the ball on directions, and I will freely admit
it. I was told by the Internet that the club was right outside the subway stop
we were supposed to get off at. I was lied to, because when we got off the
subway, we found no indication of any sort of club. But this wasn't an issue
for us, we are young and have nothing better to do, so we sallied forth into
the Guangzhou night, looking for a bar or a place with Wi-Fi from which to find
a bar. This quest was stupid in retrospect, as there's no free Wi-Fi anywhere
in China, and we had no idea where we were going, but it worked out in the end
as we soon found ourselves out on one of the bar streets in Guangzhou, thanks
to dumb luck and the hunch that if we kept going where there were more
foreigners, we'd eventually find a bar. This bar turned out to be, uh, interesting.
Our first tip-off to the nature of this establishment
should have been that there were two bulky security guards outside trying to
keep an older woman out of the bar. She seemed fairly liquored-up, so we didn't
think much of it, outside of a “What was that?” conversation as we walked down
the stairs. At the beginning of the night, the place seemed pretty normal for a
Chinese bar: overly ornate décor, overly dark corners and overly short skirts.
The good news for us was that the whiskey was delightfully cheap, even if they
started giving me Jim Beam for Jack Daniels prices halfway through the night.
Plus, as soon as we sat down in a booth they started pumping free vodka Red
Bull into us as some sort of weird promotional game that involved a roulette
wheel and always led to free booze. This was just a taste of the weirdness to
come. We finished our drinks and decided to head down the street, which landed
us at a faux-pub where I got irrationally exuberant about Arsenal (I blame the
vodka Red Bull combination). When the game was over, we went back to the first
bar and discovered that things had taken on a different tone.
In the hour or so that Miles and I had been out pretending
to know things about the Football that doesn't involve carrying a ball in your
arms, a shift had occurred in the bar we started the night at. The population
of overweight ex-pats had exploded, and shockingly (or perhaps not-so
shockingly), so had the population of attractive Chinese women. Further, the atmosphere
of the place had shifted from kind of sketchy basement bar to hopping
club/strip club. There was a DJ, and a packed dance floor, oh and everywhere
you looked there were girls wearing variations on the concept of “How little
can I wear while still seeming slightly classy”. I decided that this seemed
like an interesting place to hang out, and so we drank and watched the people
for a while. Somewhere between our first and second drinks we came to the same
realization that almost every ex-pat comes to at some point in his time in
China, generally when they are in a bar late at night: Holy shit, all of these
women are prostitutes.
This realization was confirmed again and again throughout
the night. All sorts of girls would come up to us and attempt to sell
themselves to us. I had one girl dance with me for a while before naming a
price. I politely declined, and she just moved on down the line. Along with the
hookers, there were all of the drug dealers, none of whom were particularly
subtle in their tactics. I think the best example of this happened to Miles. As
we sat watching the bar and reflecting on the fact that we were living in a Tom
Waits song, a man walked up to Miles and point blank asked him if he wanted
coke. This was nothing new, and he brushed it off without any real thought.
Now, usually when you say no, they'll just move on, but this guy just moved the
conversation on like “Hey, you want some yayo?” was the locally accepted way of
starting a casual conversation. Miles chatted with the guy for a while, growing
increasingly uncomfortable as time moved on, until we had to use the “We're
heading out” excuse to get out of the conversation. Instead of simply saying
goodbye, this guy gave Miles his business card and told Miles that he should
call if he needs anything. As it turns out, he runs an import/export business.
Drug dealers come from all kinds of different places!
Now, it would make sense that this would be the end of our
weird night, but no, there was one last surprise left in store for us. We sat
down at the bar in front of a gyrating woman in lingerie with the intention of
closing out our bar tab. However, once we sat down, the woman next to me
wrapped her leg around mine and gestured wildly for Miles to drink the shot
that she slid to him. The shot was a double, and Miles took it like a man.
Following this, she poured another, and Miles refused, leading her to angrily
demand that we pay for her tab (Yes, I know there's a logical disconnect here).
We refused, and she let go of my leg just long enough for us to get away from
her gigantic tantrum. We fled the bar, slapping a wad of bills of various
denominations on the counter, and caught a cab back to the hostel. We agreed to
never go back again.
We awoke the next morning slightly worse for wear, Miles
more-so than me thanks to the mystery whiskey woman (He thinks he might have
fallen asleep on the roof). We quickly wound up at a Subway (the restaurant)
outside of the subway (the mode of transportation), where we both got the
healthiest seeming things that we could order. As an aside, I have to raise the
point that whenever I'm hungover, my body doesn't crave greasy things like most
people. Instead, all I want is water and fresh produce. It's a system that
works out pretty well for me. Which is good, because our destination for the
day was the Guangzhou Xiangjiang Safari Park, which is a pretty hefty ride out
of town, and the concept of being hungover in a super crowded train car is
unappealing at best.
The Guangzhou Xiangjiang Safari Park is located inside a
large tourism complex called the Guangzhou Chimelong Holiday Resort, which
includes the zoo, an amusement park, and a water park that I totally would have
gone to if it wasn't still under construction. The amusement park gave Miles and
I our first good laugh of the day, as the entrance had large banners
advertising the “North American lumbering burlesque SHOW”. What is that? Well,
it's a really bad translation, but the website for the park defines it as
“Entirely American lumbering performance, original North American style, with
wild and exciting, funny and interesting effects, it vividly reproduces various
crazy performances, such as wood sawing, axe throwing, wood engraving, wood
climbing, wood trampling, and wood rolling, making you experience "wild
charm" in tale and harvest limitless pleasures”. Miles and I couldn't help
but laugh at the Chinese ideas of what we do for fun up here in Minnesota.
The zoo itself was really cool from a human perspective;
super not cool from an animal resident perspective. I was probably three to
five feet away from any of the animals, which for some of the more viscous
breeds of monkey made me pretty nervous. I mean, that monkey can totally swim,
and if it can swim across that moat, the only thing that's in between it and my
face is that bit of rope that's supposed to keep me from falling into the
water. It's not a very comforting feeling. However, it means that you get
spectacular views of some supremely depressed animals. Miles and I aimlessly
wandered the grounds, marveling at the crazy assortments of animals, just kind
of lost in all of it, although that could have been because we went in through
the exit.
There were several highlights of the day, animals ranging
from lions to tigers, elephants, pandas of both red and giant persuasion, and
giraffes. I didn't know it before I got there, but this zoo had the largest
collection of white tigers in the world, and had previously nursed the
population back from near extinction, so there was a lot of emphasis placed on
the white tigers. I got to watch feeding time, which mostly involved dangling
bits of meat in the air for them to leap and grab. It was adorable, like a
viscous, gigantic house cat. The lions were disappointing, comparatively
speaking. They just kind of laid about in the sun, sort of like a gigantic,
viscous house cat. Giraffes are, well, they're just big damn deer (not
gigantic, vicious house cats). One thing worth noting was that I got to feed
the giraffes, and I learned a lesson about the eating mechanics of giraffes. It
seems reasonable for one to expect that a giraffe nibbles away at leaves like
deer or other, shorter necked animals, right? Wrong. What those tall jerks do
is wrap their long, black tongues around branches and rip things down their
gullets. First time one took a bite of my branch it nearly pulled the branch
out of my hands.
As for pandas, well, giant pandas are giant lazy assholes.
Now, this conclusion wasn't reached at the zoo, I've disliked giant pandas for
a while now, and going to the zoo simply confirmed my suspicions about them.
Why are pandas awful? I'm glad you asked. Pandas are evolution's rejects.
They're natural carnivores that found themselves in bamboo-rich lands and said
“Well boys, I guess we eat bamboo now”. This means that they spend an
overwhelming amount of their day eating bamboo so that they can spend the next
day sitting around and eating bamboo. This also means that they're too
lazy/tired to propagate the species, which is insane. Anyway, pandas don't eat
meat, even though their bodies are made to, so they're pretty dumb. We should
stop trying to support them and move on to the red panda, which is way cuter
and is technically not a bear at all.
Dear reader, you may have noted that the name of this zoo
is the Guangzhou Xiangjiang Safari Park. You may be perplexed by what makes
this place a safari park instead of an ordinary zoo. Well, the difference is a
portion of the park called the “Safari on wheels”. It's more or less what a
safari would be like if it was designed by a slightly less considerate Disney
corporation. You sit on a little train thing and watch various animals in a
semi-free range state while Chinese people drive their cars through the park at
speeds that are likely to cause very exotic roadkill. It’s a cool concept with
a really strange execution. I might have touched a camel.
We ended the day with the elephant show, which was like
something out of a turn of the century circus run by a guy that looked a hell
of a lot like an Asian Robbie Robertson. The elephants ran the gambit of
tricks, from a balance beam to basketball to barrels, along with other tricks
that don't start with the letter B. I couldn't help but be disturbed by how
terrifying elephants look up close, with their beady eyes and floppy, jaw-less
mouths. They’re not particularly fun to look at, or god forbid to make eye
contact with.
Riding the metro back was another complete disaster, but I
suppose we expected that at this point. I got in the train, and Miles did not.
I figured this wouldn’t be a problem, as Miles would take the next train and
we’d be having dinner slightly later than we would have if the doors hadn’t
closed in Miles’s face. This turned out to not be the case, as the #3 line in
the Guangzhou metro requires you to transfer to the same line to continue to go
where you want to. I know this doesn’t make sense, but it is what it is. Miles
got completely turned around by this, and wound up showing up to the hostel a
full two hours later than I did. Apparently he took the wrong line, transferred
back, and got off at the train station, walking the mile or so back to the
hostel. By this point, neither of us had eaten for a good eight or nine hours,
and our bodies craved cheese. Pizza was in order.
Fortunately for us, there was a Papa John’s under a mile
from the hostel. This was fortunate for two reasons: It kept us off the #3
metro line, and because Papa John’s is the preferable pizza chain in China.
Pizza in China is fairly hard to come by, owing to the general lack of cheese
in the country. Generally speaking, your two options are going to be Pizza Hut
and Papa John’s, and Papa John’s is undeniably better in my experience. That’s
not to say that both aren’t a welcome reminder of home, it’s just that
something seems just slightly off about Pizza Hut’s pizza. Of course, that
might have been because my Pizza Hut pizza had avocados and corn on it. Anyway,
we quickly demolished a hearty, American-style pizza (I think it was sausage,
but it might have been supreme), and felt much better.
We walked back down to the park we visited on the first day
that we were in Guangzhou, which seems to come alive at night with lights. It’s
actually one of the things that China does really right in their cities. As
soon as the sun goes down, everything lights up like Christmas. The trees, the
buildings, the streets – everything flashes and blinks in what seems like an
attempt to completely overwhelm you and make you succumb to the awesome
developmental powers of socialism with Chinese characteristics. The thing is,
this trick works. As I stood looking up at the Canton tower swirling in all of
its light-up, faux-psychedelic glory, I felt compelled to worship it as an
ancient god I could not begin to comprehend. Looking back on it, I can’t help
but draw the conclusion that your average Chinese city dweller would be very
disappointed with recreational drugs, as nighttime in China is colorful enough
as-is.
The next day, Miles and I set out on our most ambitious journey of the trip, a train-bus-walk voyage to Lianhuashan (莲花山), a hill with a golden Buddha statue at its top. Not a bad place to spend a day and it gets us out of the city, something I don’t really tend to do when I take trips. We took the metro as far as it would go, and caught an auto rickshaw to the bus depot, paying far more than we probably should have (Although, if you converted it to dollars, it would still be a bargain basement price to get anywhere.). It was at the bus station that the struggles started, since even though Miles’s Mandarin is light years ahead of mine, it’s still not very good, and we’re in Cantonese country.
The next day, Miles and I set out on our most ambitious journey of the trip, a train-bus-walk voyage to Lianhuashan (莲花山), a hill with a golden Buddha statue at its top. Not a bad place to spend a day and it gets us out of the city, something I don’t really tend to do when I take trips. We took the metro as far as it would go, and caught an auto rickshaw to the bus depot, paying far more than we probably should have (Although, if you converted it to dollars, it would still be a bargain basement price to get anywhere.). It was at the bus station that the struggles started, since even though Miles’s Mandarin is light years ahead of mine, it’s still not very good, and we’re in Cantonese country.
Generally, if you just say the name of a place, people will
recognize that you’re a barbarian who is in completely over his head and get
you where you need to be, and that’s about half of what happened once we got to
the depot. We walked up to the ticket counter, said “莲花山”, and were met with
confusion, followed by pointing outside, toward the bus yard. That let us to a
guard, who pointed in the same direction, moving us in the general vicinity of
a group of busses, so we bummed around the busses for a while, waiting for
someone to get in one, so we could speak at him in hopes of receiving some
confirmation. That didn’t happen.
Instead, we waited around for twenty minutes, and then had the same
guard point us to a bus stop outside of the depot, where we found the
characters 莲花山, matched them with a bus
number, and were apprehensively on our way. Thankfully, the bus dropped us
exactly where we should be, and we tromped up the hill, past rows of shops
selling shiny golden incense cases to be burned on top of the hill.
Lianhuashan is an interesting place to have a Buddhist
site. It’s on top of a hill that used to be a quarry, looking out on a set of
import/export docks on the Perl River, right next to a resort (with golf!).
Nowhere that I’ve been to has there been a stronger or stranger connection
between the material world and the world of Buddhist philosophy. The ex-quarry
nature of the hill makes for some rather striking topography, with big flat
cliff sides and odd, square pools that fill with lotus blossoms when they’re in
season. Unfortunately for us, it was not lotus season, so all that was remained
was brown. This probably should have made me consider the fleeting nature of
all material things, but instead it made me hum Dead Flowers. I guess I’m not cut out for Buddhism.
We took
our time climbing to the top of the hill, where a giant golden Buddha stands
watch over the Pearl River and, presumably, the newfound prosperity of China.
Stopping at a pagoda that overlooked a pond full of would-be Yertle the
Turtles, we were approached by a group of young Chinese who asked us if we
could “take photo”. Without hesitation, Miles and I assumed a photo pose and
waited. However, something odd and magical (or so it felt at the time)
happened. They didn’t want a photo of us at all. They wanted us to take a photo
of them. So we took a photo and were on our merry way, dissecting the turn of
events that had just occurred and wondering if our reaction to the question was
self-centered, or just kind of cynical.
Not really
reaching a resolution, we made our way to the top and behaved kind of like we
were Zoroastrians touring the Vatican – respectful, but without a real
connection to any of the ceremony or traditions that were being acted out by
everyone else at the site. There were some great works of art there. Three
story high pillars of bodhisattvas made of porcelain and jade Buddhas decorated
a nearby building, all surrounding a massive golden bodhisattva (or at least I
think it was a bodhisattva. It had a lot of arms). Unfortunately for me,
somewhere along the way Miles and I got separated, and thanks to my status as a
non-cell phone owner, I had no choice but to figure out how to find him. I
started an active search of the immediate area, which failed miserably. Kind of
freaked out, I decided to do the easiest thing and just sat down not far from
the next logical step in our journey. This also failed, and an anxious 45
minutes later, I continued an active search, and with a thousand thoughts about
how I could possibly get back to Guangzhou from this remote location by myself,
I spotted Miles off in the distance, walking quickly away from me. One jog
later, we were on our way back to the bus stop, by way of a rock covered in
ancient Chinese characters and a long abandoned swimming pool.
On our way to the bus, I purchased a bottle of 王道榮
(Three
Penis Wine, or literally translated, three whip wine) from a local grocery. The
very concept of this should probably raise an eyebrow with most people, and I
don’t blame any of them. I suppose I should start out with what it is. 王道榮 (I’m going to use the
characters to keep myself from having to write three penis wine over and over
again) is a liquor brewed with the penises of three different animals. The
reasoning behind why something as oddball as 王道榮 exists is really the essence of Chinese medicine in a lot of
ways. Want to make something better? Consume more of that thing (In this case,
drink more horse dongs). It makes sense in its own strange logic, although that
logic falls apart when there’s a large man smoking a cigarette telling you not
to drink cold water because it’s bad for you. I blame culture. Anyway, back to
the wine. I cannot speak for its medicinal effects, but it tasted like musty
maple syrup, which is a huge step up from the gasoline and gummy bear taste of
baijiu. I guess it’s the snake penis that makes it taste good.
It’s rather
serendipitous that we took swigs of odd booze before boarding the bus, because
shortly after we departed, we were met with the drunkest man I have ever seen
before 5 PM. The weirder thing about this? Nobody batted an eye about him. He
was passing out, and at one point nearly vomited on the bus floor, but nobody
cared, and it goes to show a little bit about the Chinese relationship to
alcohol. See, drinking isn’t just a social thing; it’s a way of showing status
and building guangxi, or connections. What this leads to is a phenomenon
wherein you’ll go to lunch, and the host will order baijiu, and if the host
drinks, you drink, and the host will drink a lot. There will be toasts and
drinking games and general carrying on, and you will stumble away drunker than
you thought you were going to get. Sometimes this happens at lunch, and
sometimes you’ll have to teach class, but it will be okay because it was the
teachers that hosted the lunch in the first place. All the kids will think you
were more fun that day. Anyway, we watched this guy nearly get in a fight and
vomit in the span of about 30 seconds as we sped through the industrial
outskirts of Guangzhou, which made for a fittingly odd time. He stumbled out
before us, assisted by the man he nearly fought, and we thought we were home
free.
But we weren’t. After
all, this is China, and you never quite end up where you thought you would be
when you get onto a bus. In this case we did not end up at the sleek, modern
bus station on the edge of town, but at a decrepit courtyard in the middle of
the city. This had happened to us before, and we knew where we were going, so
we agreed to hop in a cab and get going. There was a problem, though. We knew
the words for metro station, but only in our awful, heavily accented Mandarin.
It’s hard enough to get a Chinese person to understand your Mandarin in
Beijing, where people actually speak Mandarin. In Guangzhou, home of Cantonese,
it’s nearly impossible. We went through several cabs until a man with a
motorcycle waved us over. We negotiated a price, he squawked something to his
partner, and we were off. And when I say off, I mean off. We were going about forty miles an hour through dense traffic,
weaving in and out of lanes, between cars, over sidewalks, all with me on the
back of a motorcycle with no helmet on, cackling like a madman because when you
reach the point that a couple of inches to the left or right is all that
separates your brain in your head from your brain on a dirty sidewalk, laughter
is really all you have left.
We made it back to the station in what had to be record
time, and caught the long metro ride back to the center of the city. We got
dinner in a place that I have long since forgotten, and made the call to go out
that night, because why not? It’s the last night we have in the city, and when
you have the chance for good beer, you have to take that chance. We said we’d
go out for one or two; it ended up being more than that. Why? Well, for as much
fun and adventure that the expatriate experience provides, there’s kind of a
dark undercurrent running through everyone that you meet. The source of it is
different for everyone, but it takes a special kind of drive to want to pack up
and move halfway around the world, and it’s that drive that allows you to meet
very interesting people. A lot of the time, these people have some very
interesting problems, and the group we met that last night in Guangzhou is a
great example of that.
I’m struggling with how to write this next part because
the people whose world we entered due to a casual, too loud reference to On the
Road seemed like decent folks -- Fun, generous, honest people – but they also
inhabited a supremely messed up circumstance. And granted, this is based off of
one drunken night spent with them, but it was a night that left an impression
on me about the expat lifestyle that I think is true. On the surface, they were
a bunch of people who were out celebrating a friend’s birthday. We hit it off
about alt-country music and the Replacements, and the beer flowed. But as the
night went on, it became pretty clear that they were a huge ball of problems.
There was a doubly-adulterous love triangle and some pretty dark thoughts, and
in the end, it really served as an example of the fact that you can’t really
run from your problems, no matter how far around the world you go. Expat
communities are full of people like that.
We woke up the next day, packed our things, and decided
to do some last minute book shopping. There’s not much to say about the
experience other than that it felt good, and it felt comforting to be able to
pop into a store and buy some Marquez and Murakami like it was not a big deal
to see something in English. I think I read something like 400 pages that day,
just out of the joy of having new books to read. I read in the train station, I
read in a park, I read in the hostel, I read on the train, and I was perfectly
content. We pulled into a rainy Nanchang morning, caught a cab to a bus to
Fuzhou, and waited for the #2 bus to Linchuan. I got on and got home just fine.
Miles did not. In fact, Miles wound up in a corn field in the pouring rain
after being denied entry to the bus I was on. How that happened I will never
understand.
