My Year in China: Kicking off the New Year

Whilst calendar New Year isn't a big deal here, as westerners I think we definitely felt the need to mark it.
Guangzhou became our party destination for the night. After an afternoon on disappointing sightseeing (we did get some good mango smoothies out of it though), we started off our evening off trying to navigate navigating a VERY busy metro journey. The Tiyu Xilu metro station is hell on earth at the best of times (we have to take it to Chinese lessons) but on New Year's Eve it was packed with people - it's made me a little bit frightful of what public transport will be like at Spring Festival (Chinese new year).

My final view of Guangzhou in 2014 (that's the Canton Tower in the middle)

After dinner at a much raved about restaurant - over-rated in my opinion - we went to meet the others who were saving seats for us at a favourite expat bar.

Fireworks are banned in Guangzhou (my students said this is because of pollution), a bit ironic really, so sadly there were no midnight shows. Instead, Guangzhou have a light show; all the bridges along the river and the neighboring skyscrapers, including the Canton Tower, are lit up in various colours - it definitely gave the city a more lively and celebratory feel.

We ended up celebrating the New Year, in a very busy expat bar called Perry's. They certainly knew how to celebrate New Year by having unlimited cocktails for women for £5 and free beer for everyone - its impressive no one needed carrying home.

It probably had something to do with all the free alcohol, but we rang in New Year dancing on the tables and taking selfies with the locals - somehow all the other foreigners seemed to have made a swift exit at some point which just left us as the mad locals jumping about on the furniture and being the centre of attention - we had a lot of fun!

1st January

James and I started our new year off very China style - with steamed buns and milk teas...you could almost mistake us for locals! As we'd spent the night in Guangzhou we decided to spend our day touristing our way back across the city towards Foshan. Imti, one of my friends who also lives in Foshan decided to join us so we formed a merry little tourist band for the day.

We had planned on going up the Canton tower but we decided against this due to the wind and haze that was over the city - being up very high on a windy day is never much fun, especially if you can't see anything!

Instead I decided to take the boys to Beijing Lu, which is a shopping street in Guangzhou, for a nosey before heading to Haizhu square. They weren't nearly as in love with the Mecca that Haizhu Square as I am - this area is full of little stalls selling anything you could possibly want for the cultural event of the moment, it's currently packed with things for Chinese New Year. FYI it's the year of the Ram next year...

Next up on tour of tourist delights was the Chen Clan Academy. I'm still unclear exactly what this complex used to be, but it was built by the Chen family in the 1800s. It's been completely restored to it's original glory and is now home to lots of different displays showing traditional Chinese crafts - some are pretty spectacular. It just so happened that there was a boy there who was offering free English tours, because his teacher had told him his English was awful and he had to improve - we thought he was pretty good!

The very beautiful roof of Chen Clan Academy

Our meandering continued around an area of Guangzhou called Changshou lu - this is an older part of Guangzhou, so it's a refreshing change to all the skyscrapers and shopping malls. We went there in search of Bruce Lee's ancestral home which we never found but the traditional charm of the area made up for that.

A canal near Changshou Lu - it could almost be Venice...

Our final destination of the day was Shamian Island. Shamian Island is a former European Concession, with most of the buildings built in the 1800s; it's like a little bit of Europe in the middle of Guangzhou. We didn't spend very long there, so it's definitely on my to-do list to revisit.

2nd January

As the 2nd was James's last day in China we decided do continue packing in the tourist hotspots or 'place of interest' as all my students call them. Xi Qiao Mountain, which is in the heart of Foshan, is somewhere that we (friends and I) have been planning on going to since we arrived, we just never quite got round to it... So the beautiful sunny day that was the 2nd January provided the opportunity to scale our local namesake landmark. Xi Qiao is famous because there is a giant statue of the Buddha of the top of the mountain - the city of Foshan is named after this (Fo means Buddha and Shan means mountain).

Walking up the mountain (well group ofbig hills really) was not what I expected. It seems to me that Chinese people are, in general, not great fans of walking, whether this is because of the heat here in the south, the sheer size of the country or what i'm not quite sure, but you can drive all the way up to the Buddha at the top of the hill, or even buy tickets for the golf buggies to drive you there if the mood takes you. We just presumed that most people would walk up the hill, like us in our merry group of 3 (Imti joined us again), but it wasn't until we got to the top, feeling slightly more disheveled and less glamorous that the suit and high-heels clad natives that surrounded us, that we realised this probably wasn't the case. I like to think we had more fun getting to the top though than they did - we also discovered more ancient and impossibly tiny staircases than they did, I think that means we had a more adventurous day out...