The train ride into Guangzhou is like going into Mordor. The sky gets darker and grayer, the landscape turns into grimey residential towers and factories. The city is generally pretty dingy with little oasises of great looking new buildings. Guangzhou is very different from Hong Kong. Hong Kong sort of spoiled us leaving us thinking we were very worldly. Guangzhou really rocked us at first, especially since the hotel lost our reservation. It is very different and very frenetic.

Our hotel,  however, is a neat, little, oasis of it's own. Very trendy with a bathroom that has frosted glass walls.

The Qingping market is reputed to be the biggest and wildest market in Asia. But I think that all big markets in the third world are pretty similar and the novelity wears off pretty quickly; stall after stall of bags of strange things: fungi or dried fruit, coils of snakes, even geckos on sticks:

We were relieved that went we got to the live animal area, that we were in the pet market. Apparently the be kind to animals campaign we saw in Hong Kong is really working, the puppies looked quite content, although the cat someone was leaving with in a plastic bag didn't have quite the same attitude.

One thing that I had never seen in a market before, a bonsai section with great plants at what seemed to be super prices – but no way to get them home (it made me think of you, Vern).

We wandered out of the market into a pedestrian street with what seemed like the entire city out having a good time on Saturday evening. It was an area as full of life as anyplace we've ever been, with music blaring from speakers, videos overhead and just lost of people having a great time.

Ahhh! The TRAIN to Guangzhou – so much better than the ferry. About an hour and half trip through highrises and factories inter spaced with the green fields.

Hong Kong spoiled us. It was so easy – this isn't Kansas anymore: that is for sure.

Mpre later.
-S

I started the day with a walk around Kowloon while Michele worked. I picked up a latte for Michele, a tea for me (note the handy carrying gizmo they gave me), and what can be loosely called a couple of breakfast ham sandwiches.

Then we set out on our daily quest to find the ferry to Guangzhou – we really are going to take the train.

Lunch at an Italian place where both of us had the seafood fettuccine. It was OK, not great, but we got served in a hurry so we could take in a Korean movie at the 33RD HK International Film Festival. The movie was billed as a Oriental Western and called The Good, The Bad, The Weird and it was all three. Very, very, violent and, at the end, the crowd applauded heartily. When we walked out of the cultural centre, the light over the harbor was gorgeous.

More exploring and marveling at the glass buildings and the reflections:

For me, it was more van envy:

And for both of us, up our favorite escalator to a Thai restaurant that was great. Thai won ton lemon grass soup, mango salad, and shrimp (whole including the heads) peanut curry.

Then the subway back to the hotel.

Michele’s overall impression of Hong Kong is that everything is so alive, mine is that everything is so modern and works so well. All the cars are new, the subway is BART plus 10 years, the buildings are new, the hotel we are in is new….with a view that shows how dense Kowloon is.

We started the day looking for a Starbucks or something. The Chinese breakfasts really looked unfamiliar. We ended up at a sort of French place where we had tea/coffee, scrambled eggs, and toast called egg mayo toast with egg –  sort of like eggs with eggs. But good eggs with eggs. After breakfast we went on a ATM hunt – the exchange rate is about 7 to 1 so you get HG$100 bills out of the ATM and they go very fast.

We spent the day sort of just wandering around Hong Kong gawking at the buildings and the people like the rubes we are. This is a huge tourist town and we are everywhere (I read somewhere that Paris is the biggest tourist town in the world with 35 million tourists a year, London second with 15 million, and Hong Kong third with 12 million.) By the end of the day, we had taken a ferry to Hong Kong island,

walked around the business district,

had lunch at a random restaurant,

taken an escalator up to the zoo which was not much of a zoo but a great escalator,

a tram to an overlook to watch the sunset, and the subway back to our hotel.

Everywhere, the natives seem young and hip – especially the girls (women?). The natives seem to be mostly Chinese, naturally, with a sprinkling of Brits. Lots of trendy stores that are familiar.Lots of sightseeing buses. And lots of tricked out vans, with drivers waiting in them, that seem to fill the eco-niche of limos.

Typical street scene downtown.

Everybody seems to love mirrored glass buildings.

Another street scene.

Michele trying to figure out how to get a ferry to Guizhou- we gave up and are going to take the train.

Did we mention that Hong Kong is dense? Very dense.

Hong Kong is definitely in the tropics and everything grows even better than in LA.

We came up here to watch the sunset which didn’t happen. Hong Kong just sort of faded into the merk.

-S

We left San Francisco on our way to China by first flying to Vancouver. We left Vancouver  about 2:30 Tuesday afternoon flying north to Hong Kong. We reset our watches to Hong Kong time and the plan was to go right to sleep but they were serving a hot meal featuring oven proof bread, a handy salt substitute (we think) and red wine.

Then we went to sleep, missing most of the mysterious landscape over Alaska and Russia.

Finally, we landed about 6 PM  Wednesday evening at Hong Kong’ gorgeous, new, almost empty airport. And then took the nicest train I have ever been on into Kowloon. The train was quiet, fast, clean, and had this nifty arc of LEDs over the door that told you where you were on the trip.

We got into and out of our hotel – modern, clean, smart – and stumbled around Hong Kong for a while, it is a strange new world. Strange – among other reasons – because in many ways it seems almost like here.

By then, we were ready for our first dinner.To be safe, we went to someplace familiar, Cheers. We ordered pork, chicken (the one without the head), and veggies. All of it was very good and almost all of it was more identifiable than I expected. It was sort of Chinese food as if it were served at TGI Fridays.

What has most struck me about Hong Kong – through jet-lagged eyes – is how modern it is. We expected frenzy, but not modern, clean frenzy. Check out these steps with a TV on the risers.

-S