This weekend we took advantage of a 3 day weekend to spend 2 of them in Guangzhou. It is a 2 hour train ride from here, an interesting joint venture between the capitalist MTR of Hong Kong and the Chinese rail system.. They cooperate very well together to give a highly efficient and pleasant service, from which Amtrak could learn a lot. My only quibble was that the restaurant car doubled as the smoking car, but given the shortness of the ride, I could live with that, particularly since part of the service was to deliver a bottle of water to each of us.

Guangzhou is better known in the west as Canton and so, unlike Shenzhen (last week’s Chinese sortie) is very old. It is old with respect to Chinese culture (as in 1000s of years) and also in terms of interactions with the west as a center for trade. A few weeks back we went to an art exhibit at the Hong Kong Museum of Art that was laid out as a travel guide to Canton, not to be used after 1850. Lots of paintings and drawings showing what the average Victorian tourist might see and do there. I believe that Guangzhou is now the third largest city in China and so it has lasted well and prospered.

English is understood and spoken only to a very limited extent. But a little pantomime goes a long way and we did not really have any problems. The hotel had little cards on which we would get them to write the names of places we wanted to go for taxi drivers. Plus we had a pretty good map that we could use to negotiate destinations. We also used the subway, though for the 4 of us, taxis came out to be the same price with greater flexibility.

Lack of being able to speak Cantonese or Mandarin to any significant extent led to interesting food experiences. Lunch 1 right after we arrived had to be close to the hotel since we were hungry. We went of the Hunan based on the fact that it was on the 6th floor and any restaurant that survives there has got to be good. The menu had very good pictures. We did not appreciate that Hunan = spicy and so unlike last week when we negotiated around one very spicy dish in Shenzhen, here they were all like that. But that tasted very good, particularly the fried eggplant and the river shrimp. Dinner ended up being Middle Eastern, for reasons also related to language, but that I won’t go into. One of the managers befriended us. He was from Jordan and insisted on going around the very extensive buffet and explaining each dish to us. Everything was very good, but also quite expensive by local standards and so we felt obliged to overeat. The next day we were in a market at lunchtime, so we just randomly selected a busy market café. There did not seem to be any menus, but the food on other people’s plates looked good and then it turned out that one of these people spoke some English. We ended up getting 4 plates of what she had (fried noodles – they were excellent, especially with a little chili sauce and fresh cilantro added) and 4 oranges sodas (because they were cold and presumably microbiologically sound). The whole meal cost 28 yuan for the 4 of us – which amounts to about US$4.50. You could spend the same amount, well actually more, on a tall latte at one of the several Starbucks, also to be found in Guangzhou. I guess we are one of the few bizarre people who frequent both kinds of establishment.

But the high point of Guangzhou for me was the Chen Ancestral home. A beautiful, very well preserved collection of buildings, about 150 years old. The decorative carvings were magnificent, either in stone, brick, wood or plaster. The whole thing was very nicely laid out and also housed a folk art museum. The museum had just about the most spectacular embroideries I have ever seen, very realistic landscapes, but with the sheen of the thread giving a texture you would not see in other mediums. There were also wonderful multiple-layered ivory carvings – I have no idea how they are done. We also had chops made. This was my solution to the problem of not being able to write my Chinese name. A chop is a stamp, in this case made out of soft stone, so now my Chinese illiteracy can be concealed. The chop carving was followed by an extended bout of tea tasting. All in all, a wonderful place to visit.