Guangzhou

(I know this is a long time coming, and I'm very sorry for the delay. John Darnelle once told John K. Samson  “Writer’s block is a bourgeois conceit. Just get to work.”, and I'm trying to take that to heart. Expect more writing more frequently. Some of it won't be China related.)

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 27^th 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 27^th 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.

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.