Recently I visited the city of Guangzhou. It is the third largest city in China at around 14 million in the metropolitan area. Jason, a local here, took me and a couple friends to the city with his family. We took the train there which was a comfortable two hour trip. As soon as I arrived I could tell this city was different than Shenzhen. It felt like China, which is strange to say since I been living in China. However Shenzhen isn’t overly crowded, it is easy to find western stores and restaurants, and other westerners. All this changed in Guangzhou.
As soon as I arrived I knew this place was different. The city was crowded, the sidewalks were crowded, the parks were crowded, and nothing was Western. We first visited Yuexiu Park. It was a pretty large park with waterfalls, trees, flowers, hiking trails, ponds, paddle boats, etc…. We hiked to the top of the park passing by several groups of elderly people playing sports. I tried playing hacky-sack with a 70 something year old man who was much more agile and flexible than I was. A cool feature of the park was water calligraphy, for lack of a better term, that people were writing on the sidewalks with large paintbrushes and water.
Afterwards we visited a memorial and the ancient capital building for Sun Yat-Sen. Sun was the man that helped make China a democracy for a time in the early 20th century. It was cool to see a bit of Chinese history, though I got tired of all the walking and the stairs (all memorials are up a mountain of stairs). We then visited a Chen Family Temple. One it was interesting to see a temple dedicated to one family. The temple had art work which I guess is made from descendants of the family. I had one guy paint me a picture with his hand (literally no brush just his hand). They had statues made of jade, paper cuttings, and bone carvings. However what stopped me in my tracks was ivory carvings. They even had small cards guaranteeing they were actual ivory, along with warnings about not taking the pieces out of China. The pieces were priced in the thousands of dollars even for the smallest items.
Lastly we ate. We stopped and had a couple different dishes none of which were bad. However one dish stood out for me, guilinggao. Guilinggao or tortoise jelly was originally made from the crushed up bone for the bottom of a tortoise shell mixed with herbs and is used as an herbal remedy for people. Modern day guillinggao is not made with shell but still is made with the other herbs and is considered to be quite good for you. The taste truly wasn’t bad either, though I am not sure how I would describe it.
Sensei Cuso 