Thunderstorms, Roosters, and Crocodiles!

I had the pleasure to wake up to the sounds of a thunderstorm this morning. And my Sperry’s, still wet from last night, got even more character today as I treaded through large puddles of water on the streets of Guangzhou—it was my fault for not packing another pair of shoes on this two day mini-trip. At 10:30am, the Liao family (Chui chui’s family) invited me for a breakfast/lunch of Dim Sum. If you haven’t heard of Dim Sum before, it is a Cantonese style meal in which a lot of different small portions of food are brought out to the table. At this kind of meal, one might have one or two bites of 10 different kinds of food. The food, as usual, was delicious.

After eating Dim Sum, we used the subway and traveled to the older part of the city where markets and small stores were. This part of the city was drastically different than the part I saw last night—there were no new buildings, nor were there a bunch of LED lights…it was my first time seeing a more traditional Chinese city. The streets were crowded with people, the stores were now humid (the rain had stopped) with no air conditioning, and all of the apartments we passed by seemed very old and run down. I bought a trinket of sorts in which I will share in one of my later blog posts, and saw a dude wearing a rooster outfit. Kind of unusual.

As we were walking through the large groups on the streets, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the men were holding other mens’ hands. I found this to be quite out of the ordinary because of the number of guys I saw do this. I asked Neal what was up, and he told me that in the Chinese culture it isn’t out of the ordinary for guys to hold each others’ hands while walking around and hanging out. He even said that it was more of a manly thing—that the tough farmers would be a lot more likely to do so than the nerdy students.

We then took a taxicab to Guangzhou’s Da Xue Chen, Guangzhou’s College City. Six years ago, the Chinese government decided to relocate the main universities of southern china all into one location. Ten universities were then moved to the outskirts of Guangzhou where there was a lot of open space. We stopped by the South Asian Institute of Technology, which holds 20,000 students, and walked around the campus. About 15 minutes into our walk around the campus we noticed that we had crossed over into another university’s campus—all 10 universities are right next to each other. One of the coolest parts of this College Town is that the Chinese government beefed up the athletic facilities due to the 2010 Pan-Asian Games, and their soccer stadium looks like a blown-up biker’s helmet. On the 10 campuses, the government had constructed 3 large stadiums to hold activities for the 2010 games—and all of them were as cool looking as the soccer stadium.

(Lake at the College Town)

(Soccer Stadium)

To finish off the day, we went downtown to the finest Seafood dinner restaurant in Guangzhou. At the restaurant, they had 30 tanks of different kinds of live sea creatures in which you could choose to eat. This ranged from traditional crab to water snakes, and even to turtle. For our dinner, we decided to go with the large shrimp, the crab, and crocodile. I saw the crocodile's leg while walking around the tanks, and was so drawn to it that we had to order some crocodile meat—and let me tell you, it was delish!

Tomorrow we are going to head back to Shenzhen. After spending the tomorrow night at Neal’s apartment, I will be moving onto the next location: Hong Kong!

-Alex