We just spent an amazing few days in Guangzhou. Guangzhou is the 3rd biggest city in all of China and it is only a 2 hour trip from Huizhou. Why haven’t we gone there before do you ask? Well we took a trip there about a week after we moved to Huizhou to meet up with some friends of ours that were traveling through Guangzhou to complete the paper work after adopting a little girl. I have actually been there twice by myself to get more passport pages added to our passports. Our first trip was a total blurr…we were still getting used to everything Chinese and we were really excited to see people from our life before China (anyone who has lived overseas will understand). The last two times, dealing with the US consulate, left me hating the idea of ever going to Guangzhou again.
We arrived at our hotel at 1:00 on Wednesday and headed to Baiyun Mountain where you can get one of the best views of the city, and walked through the Yuntai gardens where they decorated for Chinese New Year using flowers and plants.
It was a lot of walking but it was a beautiful day and a great way to start off our trip. For dinner we stopped at an Asian Fusion restaurant. They had a huge menu with amazing food (but you aren’t pregnant so you don’t care so much about the food). The best part of this restaurant was the floor show. Basically picture an Asian Mariachi band with singers and dancers dressed in costumes (Saturday Night Fever, Cowgirl, Chef, etc…). They sang a few songs and danced through the restaurant…children and adults joined in and it truly made our night.
Thursday we went to Shamian Island. It was the only place the Chinese government allowed foreigners to live while China was closed off. They gave the foreigners this horrible piece of land, meanwhile the foreigners build mansions, had sewage systems installed and running water long before China did…basically saying screw you. The buildings have been well maintained and are now apartment buildings and souvineer shops.
We stopped for lunch at a place called Lucy’s Bar and Grill. The menu had hamburgers, grilled cheese, fried chicken and they served iced tea in jumbo mason jars.
Ironically I ordered Thai green curry and Adam ordered Szechuan chicken…me I am totally having green curry cravings and Adam was excited to have American style Chinese food (good quality skinless chicken without bones with sweet and sour sauce). At this lunch we noticed there were friends from Huizhou at the next table (actually I had seen the girl a few days before and told her we were going to Guangzhou and it seems like she liked the idea) while chatting with them we found out that the Starbucks in Huizhou had officially opened! After lunch we went to a couple local markets which were mostly closed due to the holiday. If we didn’t live in China with access to street markets I would have been disappointed but it was nice to walk through the markets without being bumped and knocked. These markets made the markets in Huizhou look totally lame, I will defiantly have to go back before we head home.
We also went to the "Canton School", the oldest building in Guangdong.
We ate dinner at a German restaurant that had good beer for Adam and well…food I liked. After dinner we headed back to the hotel…even though the whole city seemed very calm I (we are blaming our lameness on me) had a long day of walking and was getting tired. We skipped the fireworks and went back to the hotel.
Saturday we went to a couple malls where we ate lunch and wondered around the new area of Guangzhou…the area I know well after wandering around for 30 min trying to find the consulate. This time I actually enjoyed the stroll, partly because the temperature was in the mid seventies, the sun was out, there were children playing in the park and my husband at my side. We walked through Ikea
(as a Huizhou ex-pat we need to walk through places like Ikea every once and a while). We ate Thai for dinner and Dairy Queen for Desert (yes you read that correctly DAIRY QUEEN).
Sunday we got to sleep in (if you count the last time I woke up) and take our time packing up and watching news in English. For lunch we went back to the first restaurant (it was really close to the hotel and it had the best green curry I had since we arrived). I totally didn’t expect another floor show but sure enough the performers did a Chinese New Year floor show which was the perfect ending to our wonderful trip. Actually the perfect ending was having our driver pick us up at the hotel and drive us to our apartment…we didn’t have to go through security or immigration.
We have decided that if we travel anywhere else while we are here we need to travel within China…then when we move back to America I really want to make sure we take our children around the US. It’s a shame we have been in China almost a year and haven’t really been a tourist in China yet. We hope to travel at least o Beijing (once the baby comes we will need to take a practice plane trip before we take him on a 20 hour flight anyway).
