Week 1 in Guangzhou - First Shopping Trips, The Pearl River, and The Dragon Boat Race Practice

This is our first trip into the city. I was able to finally find my murse, or manbag. It's amazing and I'll have to take a picture and add it. This is a battle of the bands they were having in the entrance to a mall called China Plaza. Very original.

SO one of the first things I noticed upon arriving in Hong Kong and China is that these people love lights. They put lights on every stinkin building and they are all neon moving lights so you feel like your in Vegas at all times. The other thing is how a nice new building is often built right next to a slum so it creates a huge contrast as shown in this pic.

This is the Jade Market. It is unbelievable how big it is. And everyone of these people are selling the exact same crap. Apparently to the trained eye you can pick out fake and different qualities of Jade but I sure couldn't. They have an outdoor one that is a good 2 square blocks of little stands like this. And an indoor one that is about 1 square block. Most of the stuff is decorative or jewelry with significant meaning in Buddhism.

Here is a little pond that they built in the middle of the Jade Market for people to watch while taking a break from shopping.

Ok this is the shopping center across the way from the Jade Market and the first pic is of me walking in. The next is of me looking back after I walked in. As you can see it's during the 3 day mandatory mourning for the Earthquake that the PRC had in China. Really this just is a great example of the government constantly tellling the people what to do and how to think. I mean they built that huge TV in middle of the mall plaza so they could have direct access. Look at the last pic and you can see looking out from MC D's that the people are like lemmings just watching the TV. Oh and as you can see a Super Sized Number 1 with a Coke is universal. Funny that there is another MC D's on the other side of the plaza and the building is covered in Budweiser adds for the Olympics.

So I inserted these pics at a higher resolution and size so hopefully you can see the details of the lunch I passed up for some McDonalds. I just couldn't hack it that day. This is the outdoor food court that the TV show Bizarre Foods on The Travel Channel visits....and bizarre it was. I still don't know what half this stuff is. I think it's mostly from the ocean like squid, octopus, clams, etc. Then there's always a little scorpion, dog, and whatever else they can find.

I don't really know what to say about this guy. I mean I think he was playing his flute and hoping for tips. It seems like the perfect pic for the caption game, who can come up with the best caption for this photo? The next is a building being built. See how they cover it with mesh and work under it as they come down. It's nice and finished on top, being worked on under the mesh, and just a cement skeleton on the bottom. This is actually the first building under construction that I have seen without Bamboo scaffolding.

I took this one while riding a boat down The Pearl River on the way to the Dragon Boat Practice.

So this is us at Dragon Boat practice. We are helping Maggie Wo start the Toastmasters Club in several different businesses including HSBS bank and Nortel communications. She is also the president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in GZ. She put together this Dragon Boat team with people from her own company, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and Nortel. We were under the impression that we were just going to watch the team practice but before long they had pressured us into being on the team for the day and going out for a run. We sucked cause we're so dang big that they couldn't get the boat balanced so we were tipping from side to side the whole time. The next problem is that all three of us guys are over six feet and 200 lbs so when we lean forward to row on the cadence we are hitting the guy in front of us with our oar, arms, and head. The coach was in a boat to the side of us just yelling the whole time trying to tell us what to fix but it was all in Mandarin and Cantonese so we had no idea what he was trying to tell us. We were just happy to return without tipping over even though we took on a lot of water.