GUANGZHOU, CHINA

PART THREE OF THIS SET OF TRAVELS

What can I tell you about Guangzhou? Oh, did you know it was the first city ever built in China? Yup, it's nearly as old as Ur in Sumer! And it's the place where farmers and fishermen have gathered to barter their products for over 6,000 years? How cool is that? Except for the period of the Cultural Revolution, that means over 6,000 years of trading! On the very site of Peaceful Markets too! Gosh, China is old!!!

And what makes modern Guangzhou different from every other city on earth? Roof gardens! ... And balcony gardens and windowbox gardens and gardens in every single space that could ever grow anything and lots of places which you wouldn't imagine could grow something but you'd be wrong. You can take the farmer off the farm but you can't take the farmer out of the farmer?

And they have trees on every roof! Like, full-sized trees! On a roof! I'm not kidding! I even saw a mighty mango tree up on one old tenement building and there's no way trees can reach that size if in a pot. Those roots would reach down at least five storeys. Hey, maybe they gut the downstairs apartments and fill them with soil. Or, you know, if they don't, I reckon those downstairs floors would have some mighty interesting wood panelling!

And then we reach the Bai Yun Hotel and I farewell my lovely chauffeur - who won't even take a richly deserved tip - afterall, it can't be easy standing behind someone, looking fierce and demonstrating their importance to the world for hours on end - and life suddenly becomes very ordinary and I decide that a liveried chauffeur is also one of life's necessities.

F.Y.I.: Bai Yun Hotel is very ordinary. It's meant to be one of the better Chinese hotels - one of the few where Westerners stay - but keep in mind for when you visit Guangzhou yourself, that Bai Yun charges huge prices for everything and nothing is really worth it - or perhaps the much cheaper White Swan Hotel in Shamian Dao set the standard for Chinese hotels too high - and, although they were very kind when I got attacked, they put it all on my bill afterwards, the nasty cheapskates!!!

And then it was all work for the next two days - being International Observer for Joint Masters Exams for JCU and GU - and it was all fair and honest and so-above-board it's not at all interesting thus I'll skip over the whole thing.

DAY THREE:

Too boring for words. Any good stories? Oh yeah, I discovered a great trick:

When you get lost, look frantic and grab the nearest person and say "Mobile phone. Mobile phone." all the while miming bigtime, and then you shove a phone number in their face. Startled, they ring the number and then, together, you, this phone-owning stranger and the English-speaker on the other end can work out where you are and how you get to where you need to be. Isn't it great! And the phone-owner doesn't mind; they even seem to get a real kick being able to help out. Quite often they will even walk you to where you need to go. I guess, since they don't get many foreigners in Guangzhou, it is your sovereign duty to provide silly interaction and entertainment for as many locals as you can. Probably even gives them a story to one day tell their grandchildren.

Day Three also was when I got attacked, but, mmm, do I really want to tell you about it? OK, it's all very simple. After long tedious hours of Invigilation, I get back to the hotel at 11pm and discover the whole place is basically shut down - they sleep early in Guangzhou - typical farmers! - and since they don't have anything but ghastly add-hot-water milk-tea in the rooms, I decided to walk across the skybridge to the International Shopping Mall and see if I can find a Starbucks there. Really simple in theory but ...

... the skybridge over the highway has a policeman at both ends, sure, but these are policemen in a rife-with-corruption system, and, since the beggars weren't meant to be there, obviously these guys are (omitted this piece of cynicism), and, with me, they definitely earned their money. Must say too it was all my fault! See, my purse was bulging with small currency notes - they don't appear to have coins in China - and my wad of cash was getting very difficult to handle, so (thankfully, after leaving everything over 50 yuan in my room which meant my losses weren't that serious) I decided to give all my five-yuan-and-less to the hordes of beggars I'd noticed earlier.

Big mistake! Big, big mistake!

My best advice is:
1) don't take out a wad of cash in front of beggars!
2) don't be seen to be giving out free money!
3) always make sure you have other Westerners around you late at night!
4) keep begger-money in a different pocket
5) Chinese beggars really need to learn the difference between begging and extorting money with menaces!

What happened is that, as I should have known - stupid! stupid! stupid! - I took out the wad and started dropping notes into the begging bowls when the about-thirty-strong horde descended en-masse and it all turned violent and was on the verge of becoming seriously serious when these just-finished-work waiters from Starbucks appeared and, screaming, swearing, push-and-shoving, pulled me out of the throng, and then they kindly accompanied me back to the now-locked Starbucks - the cleaners let us in - and sat with me until I stopped shaking.

And then they rang my hotel, told them what happened, put me into a taxi to take me across the road back to Bai Yun, where I was met by important-looking sorts, and, since by that time the lump on my temple had grown to a spectacularly sympathy-inducing size, they were most kind in every way - paying for the taxi since I no longer had any money, a glass of wine, a call to the report the incident to the police - but, as I mentioned earlier, it was all on my bill when I checked out! Nasty cheapskates!!!!

OK, sorting through what happened, I don't think I was deliberately hit. Inside the tendrils of everything, there's a thread that goes: a loud metallic CLUNK! as I get a seriously hard and painful blow to the side of my head, delivered from behind, and then an old lady voice behind me goes "Whaa!!!" and then elderly female nervous giggling and a hand rubbing where the blow landed - which you don't need when there are also dozens of other hands on you - and then there's lots of "Mmm, goy! Mmmm, goy! Mmm, goy! Mmmm, goy!" which is someone Cantonese behind me apologising profusely.

I think what happened is that someone elderly was trying to sell me something large and metallic and was simply trying to show it to me, but, because I was getting thrown around, it all went wrong. But there's no misinterpreting someone grabbbing you by the throat and pulling you off your feet so that one wasn't an accident. And the guy who did that was one of the half dozen who didn't have the "mana" of beggar-ness; those particular guys had mana which felt more like coal-miner-energy.

Look, if that's the case, given what coal mines are like in China, I don't blame anyone who wants to do something else for a living, but begging on a skybridge isn't the answer for these sorts, and I think the sooner the triads get hold of them and give them work more suitable for their natures and skills - like being strongarm bully-boys - the better. The others in the throng were simply beggars wanting free money and I can hardly blame them for that, given how stupid I was doing it in the first place!

MOST IMPORTANT IMFORMATION: DON'T GIVE MONEY TO BEGGARS IN CHINA!!!


DAY FOUR:

Still rather shaken, I didn't leave the hotel until the checkout time, but once I left Bai Yun and got out into the city, all felt fine and I was again feeling ready for more adventuring and jaunting, so, instead of taking a train back to Hong Kong - Keith was at work all day - at the last minute I changed plans and took the train to Shenzhen.

F.Y.I.: The train trip from Guangzhou to Shenzhen lasts more than two hours and the landscape is most boring; being mostly industrial with all that entails. They also don't have a smoking carriage. (Gosh, don't they realise they're in China! This is just WRONG!)