So this weekend just passed was
mid-autumn festival. This is a national holiday and celebrated with family,
friends and food – like most things in China.
It is customary at this time of year to give moon-cakes to people you
know as a gift. I can’t decide how to
describe a mooncake and no-one seems to be able to tell me how they are made
and/or what they are made from. They are
about 4-5cm in diameter and VERY heavy for their size. They have quite a dense
texture and their fillings vary from savoury to sweet - my mentor gave me one
with egg and lotus inside it. It was
nice but I’m glad I wasn’t inundated with them – they are heavy going so I
definitely would have had to give them away.
So in honour of this festival we got
Monday and Tuesday morning off from school – a 3 and a half day weekend is a
good way to be introduced to a new job!
As a result of the mini holiday, our
shiny new metro cards have been used to death (well almost). After dinner and a
catch up with the other ELAs on Friday night (they had got very concerned that
we hadn’t been collected from the train station since they hadn’t heard from us
all week since we had no internet), we spent the rest of the weekend
familiarising ourselves with our new home city.
Saturday
Saturday morning started out with an
‘English breakfast’ for those that were hung-over. From this awful culinary
experience I’ve learnt just to embrace local cuisine and don’t even attempt
something that is trying to be western – it only ends in disappointment and a
much smaller bank balance. I think
kung-po chicken will satisfy anyone’s need for fried food better than a dodgy cooked breakfast in this
country.
I thought this sign was nice and colourful
After the disappointing start on the food front, we left the confines of Foshan for the neighbouring city of Guangzhou – the third largest city in China! We nosied in past the home of some of the other ELAs – I think we’ve all been pretty lucky on the accommodation front, and then went exploring. We walked through some rugged streets and past, what I would call, authentic China – no glass skyscrapers here! The Pearl River runs through the centre of Guangzhou so we decided to make that our destination because it looks quite pretty at night when it’s all lit up. Our day basically consisted of walking around and seeing what treasures our new home city contains – there are plenty to discover. We didn’t tick anything off the tourist trail, except seeing the canton tower (second highest building in the world) but that was never the aim. It seems to take a long time to walk anywhere here; the place is just so huge and the heat makes 1 hour feel like 3 – definitely some adjusting to do!
China is
definitely going to be a year full of firsts. This weekend’s first was finding
a pet shop in a shopping mall. They had the cutest little mini rabbits – if
common sense hadn’t kicked in I would definitely now be the proud owner of a
cute little rabbit (the only thing that stopped me was knowing I’m only here
for 10 months). I might
just have to get a stuffed toy replica and pretend it’s real when I feel the
need for a crazy moment.
(Another
first was seeing a bra hanging on a telephone line and the matching knickers in
the tree below – I would have loved to hang around to how she retrieved those!)
Saturday’s
chilled out vibe continued with dinner consisting of fish balls from the
7Eleven (these were fish meat made into ball shapes) and some beer, eaten on
the riverside – not so classy but just what we needed.
Some pictures of Guangzhou....
Some pictures of Guangzhou....
Canton Tower
Sunday
On Sunday,
Tom and I decided to explore some of Foshan – we felt we hadn’t ventured
further than our 5 minute walk to and from School all week. We had seen ‘The financial hi-tech zone’ and
‘Qiandeng lake’ marked on the metro line map and decided these sounded like
good places to start the adventure.
So, ‘the
financial high tech zone’ will one day be very high tech, but currently it’s a
building site. We had a niggling
feeling from the start that this would be the case but we wanted to check it
out anyway, our dream careers may have been just outside the door – not
surprisingly this wasn’t the case! The pavements and roads just end abruptly
and there aren’t really any buildings to speak of yet – in a year’s time I’m
sure that will be a very different story! Not surprisingly we found yet another
shopping mall (we walked through it purely for the air conditioning).
After that
we headed onto Qiandeng lake. We did ideally think we could walk there, since
it was only the next metro stop on, but after walking in what we thought was
the right direction and coming to a dead-end, we decided the metro was the
wisest option (we aren’t fluent enough to get ourselves un-lost anywhere
yet). My vision of Qiandeng lake was
that it would be the Chinese version of Central Park – maybe not surprisingly,
I was wrong about that. The lake and
park that surrounds it is nice but it’s 100% man-made – no natural beauty here. This really shouldn't have surprised me given
that basically everything in Foshan appears to have appeared within the last 10
years. The lake is basically a giant boating pond but you can hire peddle-oes
and spend the afternoon floating about which would be quite nice. There are also bikes that accommodate 4
people, which would be fun with friends and families. It would be a good place
to go to in the evening; it’s apparently quite pretty when it’s all lit up.
When a
westerner goes anywhere in China, they turn into a tourist attraction – this
weekend Tom and I were no exception. When we were sitting in Qiandeng park a
family walked past all grinned and shouted ‘Hello’, we’ve got used to this sort
of response to us and of course smiled and said ‘Ni Hao’ (Hello) back, we
thought nothing more of it. Later on it was our turn to walk past them and as
we did they waved us over. We weren’t sure what was about to happen. The family
of six was sitting tucking into a giant piece of fruit and had beckoned us over
to share it with us. I don’t even know how to describe how lovely and welcoming
that gesture was, the fruit also hit the spot perfectly. Amazingly we managed
to tell them, in Chinese, that we are English teachers (check us). After that we were all a little stuck for
conversation so we all just stood there grinning at each other and eating fruit
– it was lovely.
The VERY natural Qiandeng Park. Note the round, smooth boulders on the rugged rocks...
Also when
we were walking around this
weekend we randomly had “your beautiful” shouted at us, which is unquestionably
good for the ego; China is definitely the country to come to if you’re a
westerner experiencing a crisis of confidence.
So by the end of the day we were
quite pleased with ourselves. We had been befriended and fed by some locals,
flattered by others, managed to recognise and match some Chinese characters to
help us get about and even found Wallmart! Success!
For Sunday evening dinner we went to
one of the fanciest restaurants on our little street – we felt VERY foreign.
The pair of us walked into a massive room of lots of extended Chinese families
all enjoying a feast and they sat us down right in the middle – the Chinese
grandmother at the next table over was very intrigued, and we were slightly
intimidated! The food was fairly nice,
we haven’t got a clue what we ate – but it took 45 minutes to get our food,
anything over 5 minutes delivery time makes us impatient already, I think they
did forget about us though…how dare they! ;-)
Monday
So like the weather on every proper
holiday – today (Monday) it rained, with some thunder to boot! Despite this
being our first sight of rain since we arrived in the area, rain and thunder
storms are pretty commonplace here because of the humidity; we had a dry
thunder the storm the other day, which I found pretty strange because normally
when I hear thunder there’s driving rain and visible lightning to accompany it.
After the rain subsided it turned
into (another) very hot, but beautiful day so we decided to do some more
exploring. We discovered that we are
very close to the river (currently not sure the name, downside of not having
either a map or the internet) so that was our starting point. It’s no surprise that you’re not allowed to
drink the water here if the murky green colour of the river is anything to go
by, but the riverside itself is very pretty and very well kept.
Walking around the city, it is very evident
that Foshan is a modern city which is in the throes of rapid development and growth
– there are glass covered skyscrapers popping up everywhere – a slightly
strange contrast to the older things it surrounds. There are also so many
shopping malls here it’s verging on the ridiculous – they all look brand new
and are all humongous – you have to walk a long way to find anything that
doesn’t look like it’s been built from glass our outside the last 5(ish)
years. On that note, we walked much
further than we realised and happily came across some older, more rugged
streets full of people selling huge variety of goods from shops the size of
garages – this was the kind of China I wanted to see (I’m fed up with glass
buildings already). I was beginning to think all of this older more traditional
China had been replaced. I didn’t take any photos here, I was too busy marveling at my surroundings and the people in them.
Tom!
I did take this one picture though - I love the shape of these buildings
G x
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