Trip To South China Part 3

5-2-10

The next morning Charlie and I woke up and met the French, as well as a girl Charlie had gone to elementary school with back in Harbin, down stairs.  She now lived in Shenzhen and would be our guide for the rest of the day.  Of course the first order of business was breakfast which consisted of two gummy sweet pumpkin disks, and two stuffed asian biscuits, one filled with pork the other with beef.

From there we made our way to one of the city's many parks.  It was quite pretty, maybe not as much as Century Park, but the people more than made up for it.  I will say this, Shenzhen people, we've noticed, are far warmer the people of Shanghai (and the girls are much prettier (except Yiyi of course)).  But in the park they were even better!

The park itself is dedicated to the founder of Shenzhen, Deng Xiaoping, who is practically worshiped here.  His face seems to be everywhere in this city. 

As we walked, we stumbled across many people dancing, and singing.  An old man even showed us some Taichi.  We also saw a Spanish family being taught martial arts.

Once we visited the park we headed over to the Technology malls, which were pretty much a gear head's paradise.  You can pretty much find every little part you ever wanted, for example you could building your own mother board from scratch.  The mall also has many shady items for sale, Charlie even mentioned that you could put any major label on any phone you buy.  Not only that but they had many custom built items, especially cell phones.  One was shaped like a cross, another looked like a Razor with a mechanically watch on the front and many MANY more.

 

Sandra was bold enough to buy an "iPod Nano" with a built in camera, and also bought a memory card.  But I just couldn't, after my experience with my MP3 player (which still works by the way) I always want to be able to return what I buy.  One of the shop keepers did make the mistake of grabbing my arm which even though she was pretty always freaks me out and I must have really looked angry because when I ended up coming back (Clement was buying something from her) she seemed very sorry and even said "no worries, no touch."  I took her photo. =P

 

After that little adventure our group scored some lunch, and I got some of the best green beans ever.  Perfectly cooked, with a nice beef broth/oil, and slice of garlic mixed in.  So tasty!!

Once we were done we traveled to the "Window of the World," a mockery almost of all the famous places in the world.  Luckily instead of paying the 100RMB to go in we took a 40 RMB tram ride around the park.  It sucked.  The strange thing is it didn't even really take us around the park, ok maybe it took us "around it" if by that you mean we got to see the very back of some buildings, and even that was constantly blocked by trees.  The only thing that was truly show cased was the apartments were supposedly a large number of expats live.  But being able to sit for 25 min after being on our feet all day = priceless.

Once that little adventure was over with we made our way to another city park.  This one was packed, with flying kites being the activity of choice.  Our group though decided to make the treacherous trek up the steep hill this park was built around.  Then disaster struck…

Sandra had to pee.

With the woman's restroom stereotypically having a line forming around the door she made the ultimate sacrifice to the Bladder God.  Breaking any form of local custom or social etiquette, she made a mad dash for the men's restroom.  There her senses were beaten, abused, and ultimately made to suffer the worse of humanity.  Based off of her eye witness accounts there was shit, piss, and vomit everywhere!  The stench on this warm summer day had then baked it into a delicate dish that only the French's refined tastes could truly appreciate.  In the end she made it, though a large chunk of her feminine sensibility was flushed away in the process.

Back on the trail the traveling was insanely difficult, after a full day of walking, a backpack, and Charlie, who I had to run to keep up with, the climb was certainly not for the feint of heart.  The top of the "hill" gave us a glorious view of the entire city, and also gave us a glimpse at the local Shenzhen's devotion to their founder.  For at the top was a giant statue of Deng Xiaoping with many flowers surrounding it.

On the way down we stopped to read the inscription on the back of the statue, but Charlie was having difficulty translating for us, when all of a sudden a middle-aged man Chinese man offered to let his daughter translate for us.  Her English was perfect, down to the American accent and everything.  The man explained that she was being tutored by a teacher from Chicago, who apparently really knows what they're doing.  Thinking back on it I wish I had more time to talk to him because his English level also indicated that he was probably very high up in the business world.

Squished once more into the bus, we met up with the girl's and Stephen back at the hostel.  They had taken a trip out to a local spa for the day to relax.  They said it was a little shabby but they all really liked experiencing the effect of sitting in a tub and having little fishes eat at your dead skin.  And they had bumper cars.

We then headed out into the night to grab some grub, and also to find a coffee shop.  Honestly I'm not sure what to write about the walk.  I learned something about the girls, Audre likes classic rock but not jazz, whereas Kiane had a lot of friends in various garage bands and now she's completely burned out on music altogether.  But if you really want me to be honest my biggest problem is that I've now simply forgotten.  It's now two days after these events have taken place and even though I really enjoyed our conversations my mind can't hold on to the details of our conversation.  Agnes mentioned that when she writes her blog, which she updates once a week, she writes out a brief list of details to talk about for the day.  I may need to start doing that because the conversations are what I've come to cherish most (stop laughing, I'm serious).

O ya so one thing I think is really cool is that during the "photo shoot" at the beach the photographer from the newspaper took a photo of me taking a photo of the girls.  I now have in my possession a copy of the Shenzhen newspaper with a photo of us in it!! (as I write this I realize I've said this twice now, but o well)

Afterwards I went back with Stephen, Charlie, and the girls to their room and we just sat around and had a drink or two and chatted until around 1am.  Stephen seems pretty cool, shame we couldn't hang out more.  End of 5-2-10