Last Saturday (October 1st) it was the 62nd anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. For that reason I did not have to work last week. So I decided to use the time to get to know Guangzhou and some other cities in Guangdong. So after sleeping in on Saturday, Alex (the other “kulturweit” volunteer) and I against the advice of all my colleagues decided to do a little bit of sightseeing in Guangzhou. At first we went to the Sun Yat-sen memorial (I get the impression every city has a Sun Yat-sen memorial somewhere), which was located in a really nice park. After having taken the subway I understood why everybody was so surprised I wanted to do touristy stuff on Saturday. Even though the subway is always crowded, I was quite shocked when I got off the train at one of the bigger stations. It was impossible to move individually, you were just pushed with the crowd. On the outside of the Sun Yat-sen memorial a text praised the building to be ‘a pearl of Chinese architecture’. Thus, ‘gespannt wie ein Flitzebogen’ (German expression saying that I was very excited) I entered the building and was very surprised to see an ordinary theatre with a stage up in front. It was still nice to get a little more information about the founding father of modern China.
The next stop was one of the many parks in Guangzhou: the Yuexie Park, which appears to be by far the biggest. Since I had not gone to a park here before I expect to see a European style park (before I didn’t think that there were different styles of parks), but the park we entered was quite different from those I’m used to in Europe. I mean yeah there are trees and other green things, but other than that. Well, in Germany I guess people go to parks to relax and to be close to nature, however in the park there were cemented paths and loudspeakers with ‘relaxing’ music everywhere. Besides with more than 10 people per square meter (most of them taking pictures of the only two blond haired in the park) going for a quiet and relaxing walk is very hard. I guess I’ll have to come back when it is not national holiday.
After that we met with another volunteer to go for dinner. I had read in the Lonely Planet for China that there was supposed to be a very good Uyghur Restaurant ‘behind the TMall’. Although the TMall is really big and behind the TMall could mean all of its four sides we decided to try it. Yet the map in the guide book was not very exact. So suspecting that we were on the right track we walked down the street behind the TMall about 20 minutes. Not finding it Alex suggested to turn into one of the side streets because he thought that that would be the right direction. Once we had left the big street (it was already 7 pm and dark) there were fewer people and much fewer lights. So we kept on walking about another 20 minutes in that direction, passing parts of the streets without lights and no shops. I was convinced we were wrong, but Alex (usually having a very good sense of orientation) thought that we should be there soon. After another 5 minutes we turned right (you have to imagine that we were about 20 minutes walk away from any street we knew, around us were only street vendors and cookshops) because there were a couple of shops. At the end of the street I said that we should finally ask somebody. When Alex answered “Ask that guy he looks like a Uyghur” I looked at him skeptically, because how could one say how an Uyghur looks like by just one look? Well he actually had a good explanation and when I asked the guy he led us through some even darker streets, but finally (shortly before we were convinced that he was just going to rob us) we arrived at the restaurant. So I guess this story goes to show, how you just have to be lucky and follow the right people 🙂 Because the food was amazing and the people were extremely nice. So if anybody ever is in Guangzhou tell me and I’ll tell you were to find this amazing restaurant.
Finally, on Chinese national day we celebrated the Chinese minorities =)
Okay -I’m all caught up now! Business cards are important, you should probably get a few printed up and remember to take the ones from other people with both hands and read both the front and back thoroughly before putting it away! That’s the way it was in Korea anyway. If you took it with one hand your sort of held your elbow with the other hand… In Korea, we often got cards with Korean on one side and English on the other. Maybe you could get a card that has Korean on one side and German on the other!
It was great talking to you!