Macau for May Day

We got a three day holiday (which in China actually means we had to work on Saturday and then got Sunday-Tuesday off) and so we again packed our bags and this time headed to Zhuhai and then across the border to Macau.  It's the middle of monsoon season now and the rains were pouring, but luckily the weather improved and only sprinkled a few times for us.  Zhuhai turned out to not be too interesting, but we stayed there because it's much cheaper than Macau!   Monday morning we crossed the border (after a two hour line) and headed to the Vegas of the East.  We started at the Venetian, where Thomas explained a lot of the games to us.  It was my first casino!  And what a choice. It has the biggest casino floor in the world, and is head to toe gilded. 

We did some tours of Cathedrals and architecture, which was interesting because Macau used to be a Portuguese colony so it is a big difference from mainland.  After a delicious feast at Alfonso III, we went to some more casinos, including the Grand Lisboa, the Wynn, and the MGM Grand.  After getting a refresher course from Thomas, I played black jack and won a hundred dollars!  As my first time gambling, it was a great time and I can now say I've never lost :P

  

Rain out my window

Fisher girl statue at Zhuhai

the Venetian

St. Paul's Cathedral ruins

View over the city

In the MGM, an actual live butterfly globe

Lookin at a winner!

Camping in Hong Kong

We decided to invest in a tent a couple weeks ago and took advantage of our three days off to use it.  I went camping with Christiane and Thomas on Lantau Island in Hong Kong.  It took us a looooong time to get there because it turns out everyone was trying to go to HK, but after two buses, a metro, lunch, a ferry, and another bus (four or five hours later) we got there.  The campsite was a lot nicer than we expected; it had campgrounds with tables and laundry lines, not to mention a clean bathroom with showers.  We stayed for two nights and were able to tour the island and see the big Buddha, go to a stilt house fishing town, and hike.  Well, Christiane and Thomas got to hike.  Because...
Only draw back -- I got some kind of food poisoning from breakfast and had to delay the trip an hour to rally, and on top of that had a bad head cold!  Come on, China.  So I stayed in the tent while they went hiking (sad face) but otherwise tried my best to keep up.
We didn't have a lot of things we needed, like fire wood, pads to sleep on (we were literally separated from the rocky ground by only the tent) or flashlights (we found out once we got there that T had forgotten his headlamp).  But we made it work.  By far not the most comfortable nights of our lives, but it wasn't too bad.  We might even go back to another site next weekend if I can recuperate enough (I got another kind of stomach flu this week, COME ON, CHINA!).
It was a little foggy / hazy but the pictures still turned out.
::I know the pictures are orientated strangely, it's a problem with the website.  I'm not able to rotate them, sorry!::

Kaiping Day Trip

jenniferautumnd's photostream on Flickr.

This weekend we (Christiane, Thomas, Matt and myself) got off our couches and took a day trip to Kaiping, a city that's about 3 hours away by bus. It's famous for it's buildings called Diaolous, which are essentially tiny castles slash fortified houses which were built by returning overseas Chinese who had made it big. They were greatly concerned about bandits and put much effort into these buildings for protection. The styles are unique because the overseas Chines picked up interest in architecture from around the world and integrated it with typical Chinese styles.

They are also the perfect spot to get to in case of a zombie outbreak, we've decided.

The city of Kaiping isn't great though. We had more than enough time in 6 hours too see/do everything we could. And it is not a foreigner friendly city! We had to modify our plans several times because when we got to a site, the ticket office would tell us we had to buy a ridiculously expensive ticket -- think of it this way, seeing the Terra Cotta Warriors in Xi'an cost Y70, and to see these fortified houses they wanted Y100! They even told the driver we hired that it would be free if we were Chinese. ::sigh:: sometimes China's frustratingly outdated.  Needless to say, we didn't pay it.  Instead we would try to drive around and see what we could, and at one site our driver distracted the ticket ladies while we ran by like we didn't know any better!

That aside, it was a fun trip and we got to see a decent amount. Our driver was very helpful and introduced us to different spots and the regional foods.

We left at 5:30am and got back at 11:00pm, long day! But we get to check another location off our list!

More information on Kaiping:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiping

Guangzhou, the "goat city"

I know I haven't been doing a good enough job of giving the locations I'm in because to me it's obvious so why wouldn't everyone know the geography of China?  So above I've posted a map of where the city is I'm talking about: Guangzhou city in Guangdong ("Canton") province.  You can see Shenzhen a little below it and Hong Kong further below that.

I spent Monday-Wednesday siteseeing around Guangzhou, which is an hour train ride north of us (or an half an hour if you take the brand new bullet train! but my travel comrades didn't trust it yet).  It is in the heart of Guangdong province (which is "Canton" in Cantonese) and at the Pearl River Delta, with a history as long as Greece's.

We had some big trouble with our hostel when we finally arrived in the late afternoon, because despite us having booked on hostelworld they hadn't recorded our booking and gave it away to other guests who wanted to extend their visit.  We were stuck in their lobby trying to call and find other hostels ourselves, because instead of helping us the manager turned her phone off for a mystery hour and a half long meeting.  The internet was slow at best and most of my group wanted to rest, so it took a while for Thomas and I too finally get a hold of a hostel with room for 5 at the last minute and find out how to get there.  Another hour or so later and we finally were able to check in and dump our stuff.  Luckily, the new hostel was much better.

We headed down to the Pearl River and ate some soup noodles (and beer) then took a short night river cruise.  The moon was out and the weather was nice so it was pleasant indeed.  Afterwards we wandered around the area, grabbed some more drinks and headed back to the hostel to play cards on the patio.

Sleeping was a little less than satisfactory, mainly attributed to the rock hard beds which I guess are comfortable to people with no hips to speak of (i.e. not foreign women) and the less-than-quiet dorm mates in our 8 person room.

But morning came as it always does and we grabbed some snacks from the bakery before heading to the famous Five Goat Park.  There is a legend that celestial beings descended on goats and brought the first grain to Guangzhou, and so the goats are famous here.  We walked the park and found a pagoda and a Sun Yat-Sen memorial tower, as well as a plaza with many people playing Chinese hacky-sac.
We headed to a peaceful buddhist temple and enjoyed the incense and quiet for a while, before taking a cab to the Nanyue king Mausoleum.  It is a tomb of a famous Emperor dating back over 2,000 years.  They have the orignal site of the tomb as well as a museum of artifacts and the largest collection of ceramic pillows (don't worry, someone had to state the apparently obvious to me too - yes, ceramic pillows would be dreadfully uncomfortable, they are only used for the dead).  There was even some dust under a case with a plaque claiming it was the 2,000+ year old remains of the emperor's favorite concubine.  15 people were sacrificed and buried in the king's tomb.
Later we ventured to look for an antique market but it proved to be extremely not exciting so we head back.
For dinner we went to a Guangdong-style restaurant and tried to order some of the famous cuisine.  Cantonese food is not my favorite in the scheme of Chinese food -- I'm more partial to northern cuisine -- because it involves a lot of things with a more squishy texture and loves to center around dishes like "running chicken" which is an entire chicken on a plate with a texture as if it had been boiled in goo. You will commonly find either entire animals, or different bits of them, like chicken feet or fish heads. I wasn't even aware fish heads were edible, but there you are. Cantonese people love it, but it's not my thing.  Luckily it also includes a lot of seafood, which I love, and taro/pumpkin/coconut milk stews, which I love.

Everyone went back to SZ after dinner except me and Thomas, who wanted to stay another night and see some more things the next day.  Which, after another unfortunately uncomfortable night, we did.
Following a much more relaxed itinerary, we went back to the Guangzhou Restaurant and ate some famous dim sum.  This was more complicated to begin with because the menu had zero English or pictures.  My Chinese is ok for generic foods, but the more specific the less I know.  There has to be dozens of different words for dumplings, depending on how they're cooked and what's in them.  But after explaining to the waitress that we couldn't read, she helped us pick some and the choices were good.  It was delicious and I had plenty of tea, so felt great.
We walked east for about 45 minutes looking for the famous tower, and finally found it.  We just wandered around for a while, looking at various cool skyscrapers (of which there are many) and happened to run into the Guangzhou Museum, so we browsed around inside.  It was nothing too exciting, but I'm a little snobby about museums after being to Athens :-P.
Exhausted from carrying our backpacks around all day, we decided it was a good time to leave.  I still want to go back to see some sites, like the Whampoa Military Academy (which is a famous place where many important revolutionary and WWII figures went, and is supposedly a museum of the revolution now) and the art museum.

It was a fun short trip and good practice for the upcoming one!

View from the hostel roof

river cruise

Pearl River

Ceramic pillows

Ancient hot pot

Tomb entrance

And thus five celestial beings descended on goats and brought grain and blessings to the people

Is it just me or does the Opera House look like a spaceship?

the famous Canton tower

the museum

Apparently the ancients like to build dioramas too

My favorite theory of dinosaur extinction thus far, straight from the Guangzhou Museum:

"The dinosaur contemporary small mammals belong to rodents' predetor; they can feed on dinosaur eggs. Because of this small animal lack of predetors, their population become larger, and more eventually the dinosaur eggs are ate out."

You heard it here first. The dinosaurs died because this fox creature ate all the eggs. All of them.