Returned recently from my longest stint (5 days) in China @ Guangzhou. The longest duration where I got to play dumb for most of the time. Either in a taxi or restaurant - all I could do is point at stuff - no talking. Taxi drivers needed to see addresses in Chinese if I had to go some place. Thanks to smart phones I Google the location at my hotel and just show it to the driver - thankfully I didn't have to "draw" the address myself. The return journey is fairly simple - I show my room card which has the hotel address. The only trouble is if I had to make one another stop - well I didn't dare to. Upon seeing the address they usually confirm with a "OK OK" or "OK Lah" - which gives me assurance that I will be taken to the destination of choice. Now I figured where the "Lah" business in Singapore comes from - its from their Chinese counterparts. Restaurants - that's a longer story which I will share a little later below.
Reached Guangzhou at 4 AM in the morning. Which happened to be the first flight of the day. We in fact opened up the immigration desks to let us out. If my opening paragraph gave you any idea how I had to deal with taxi drivers, my adventure began with having to haggle / negotiate taxi charges to the hotel. During reasonable business hours taxis operate on meter here. At 5 AM in the morning those rules went out the door. I vaguely remembered paying about 80 Yuan the last time and was able to bring it down from ¥200 to ¥ 120. Thought it was reasonable to give 1.5 fare for early in the morning.
Managed to get some sleep in the morning - not an easy job to start sleeping at 7 AM in the morning. Later in the evening went to the Pearl River promenade with the idea of getting on to a late evening river cruise. It was an hour long cruise which crossed a few bridges across the river. Had some good clicks of the Guangzhou skyline. "Work" began next day with a grand lunch organized by our Guangzhou center head with our client. It was a multi-course lunch where food in small portions that just kept coming. Had a chance to taste the famous Peking duck for the first time (maybe 2nd?). The whole duck was first presented to us for a visual treat and then the hostess takes it back to carve it out to different meals. The crispy skin and some meat was used as a filling in a pancake and then remaining meat was served in some sort of stir-fry.
Talking about eating and restaurants it definitely was an interesting experience the past five days. Had a chance to try the multicourse expensive restaurant meal all the way to a "kaiyendhi bhavan" style street food. In any restaurant where it is inside a building there is usually a menu with either food pictures or an English translation (however strange it may sound - like a "dancing buddha"). However with street food I had to point to the type of noodles, the meat (if I could think it was chicken) and egg. Needless to say - the taste was amazing. The worst experience I had was eating spaghetti with prawns in tomato sauce in a Chinese restaurant. I literally walked past a few Italian restaurants on that street thinking I should only eat Chinese while in China. I ended up at these seemingly 100% Chinese joint which had many many menu options. After a good read I ended up selecting "Spaghetti with shrimp" with a very sincere assumption that spaghetti was just a translation for regular noodles. My heart sank when I saw them (yes I had a seat with a good view of the kitchen) put a lump of boiled spaghetti in a bowl and topped it up with prawns in tomato sauce.
The hotel that I stayed was adjacent the famous "Beijing Road Shopping District". A block of few pedestrian only streets with the colourful shops of various budget ranges. Whenever I walk there I seem to have the board "Tourist" written on top of my head with glowing neon lights. Every few steps the "imitation hawkers" approach me trying to convince me the benefits of a Rolex watch. You don't like watches its ok - handbags, perfumes - you name it they have it. Felt a bit annoyed at first but then got used to it. Apart from Chinese you get to see a lot of middle eastern and african people in China. In fact there were quite a few middle eastern restaurants as well. Of course there are a few Caucasian expats around but not many from the Indian sub continent. I did see a few but not as many as you would see in any other western country. The time I visited there happened to be the time for the 114th trade fair / exhibition of some sort. The restaurants had the banners stating "ovation to the participants of the trade fair" - whatever that translates to Chinese - which I think means "Welcome to the participants...". I also learned that whenever they say "maybe" - it means they are pretty sure about it. :-)
One unfortunate event happened during my stay there. A colleague of mine was assigned to accompany me on a local sight seeing / shopping trip. After about 10 minutes on the road he got a call from his mom that his father was in ICU. We immediately rushed to the hospital and then I continued on with another colleague. After a few hours that guy calls up this new colleague and checks whether I was doing fine and whether was able to do what I intended to do. I asked this new guy to call him back and enquire about his dad and got to know he had expired a few hours ago. I was shocked that a guy who's father had just expired checks in on me to ensure my sightseeing was happening as planned. Chinese hospitality at its heights!!!
Click here for a few photos.
So long folks. Until next time...
C
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