Out and about

Yesterday, Danny and I went out to explore beyond our local neighborhood in Guangzhou. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-4w1DjcGjU&feature=em-upload_owner

First we walked to the subway station (see link above for video). The subway station was significantly more congested than the "sidewalks" of the street we walked on to get there. 

I was well-armed with all the station names, subway lines and number of stops needed for our trip to another part of town where many adoptive parents stay, but I was very pleasantly surprised to find that everything related to the subway (ticket machines, signs, announcements and electronic maps in the subway cars) were all given in English as well as Chinese characters and pinyin (Chinese spelled out in roman letters). Announcements were in Cantonese, Mandarin and English. With all this information available, I always knew exactly where I was and that only left the challenge of being able to enter and exit the subway when I wanted to among the crushing crowds of people. 

Danny has a thorough appreciation of my Western tendencies to queue in a line and to expect that if I am standing at the front of a line that my turn will be next. He knows that I've got this all wrong and does his best to make sure I'm aggressive enough to actually get our turn. On the subway, I tell him "this one" as we start to pull in to our stop. He then waits until the train slow, grabs my hand and maneuvers us through a solid wall of people. I'm pretty sure this kid has never taken public transportation but he's got a knack for getting himself where he needs to be. I'm going to hold off on any explanation of queuing and politely waiting your turn until we get home because his skills are serving us really well here. 

We traveled to the Central Business district which was quite sterile and modern compared to our area of town. There are a number of restaurants and high-end stores there.  We opted to go to Trustmart which is what Walmart is called in China. It was spread out over two floors and had most of the same categories of items as Walmart. It did not look at all like a Walmart. It reminded my a lot of a Ben Franklin or Woolworth's. 

We walked around for a while and then took the subway back to our hotel. The trip back at 5 pm was more crowded than our earlier trip but by that time we were old pro's.

Here's another 

view of our neighborhood from our hotel room. On some of the main streets, the buildings have very modern facades but the buildings themselves are ver simply constructed out of concrete block and tin or wooden roofs.