China Revisited --2013 [27]

Caught in Traffic
or Why We Don't Ride the Subway in Guangzhou

On our way to Guangzhou -- Edward driving and his mother riding shot gun -- I wrote down two signs in English I thought were worth remembering.  One sign on the side of an office building read, "Community Childbearing Culture Center." Donna and I had a long discussion as to what childbearing culture might suggest.

The second was a traffic sign of the "Click it or Ticket" variety we see in New York. It read "Beat Traffic Bandits and Obey Traffic Laws."

So we beat the traffic bandits and obeyed the traffic laws. I am not sure what traffic bandits are, but we did not beat the heavy traffic. Nevertheless, we got to our hotel, the Ritz Carlton, in good shape, and began the cycle of big meals with former students and parents who wanted to express their thanks to Donna for her efforts in teaching their kids.

We met up with Yujia, who had taken the train back to Guangzhou the day before, her parents, April (pictured below, left), and Cynthia (below, next to April). We piled into two or three cars and made our way through considerable traffic from the new part of Guangzhou, where our hotel was located, to the "old" city, where we were to visit a cultural treasure.   It took an hour, more or less, mostly spent merging or waiting for lights to change. My notes record that Edward was "fuming." I don't any longer know what I meant by that.

At one point as we were sitting in traffic making smart comments about getting out to walk (like mother-in-law jokes, these comments transcend cultural barriers), we asked whether there was a subway system in Guangzhou. Surely, we thought, there must be a way to beat the red lights at every intersection and the pedestrians and the merging lane backups.

"Yes, of course Guangzhou has a subway. This is a modern city."

"Do you ever take it?"

"No. Never. It is too crowded and very complicated.  It would take us twice as long to get where we are going."

When we arrived at Chen's Lineage Hall, a huge walled compound similar in outward appearance to YuYin Shan Fang, we met Syan, another former student and frequent visitor at our home, and his mother.

The Hall was only open for another hour -- was it worth going in at all? There was animated conversation in Chinese; then we moved toward the ticket booth. Since we had made the long trip to the old city from the hotel and would have another long trip back, it had been decided we would see what we could see.

Then, when we had rushed through the Hall, which I write about in my next post, we stopped in the Museum store to find some little things to take back to the US. Most of the things that caught my eye were too big (for suitcases), too heavy (stone sculptures, books), too cumbersome (the paintings and calligraphy), too expensive (most of these) or too touristy (trinkets one could find in NY, Hong Kong, London). 

 We settled on postcards and name stamps, which were carved with our initials in both English and an old form of Chinese while we watched.
 
From Chen's Lineage Hall we reentered the traffic to head for dinner at a restaurant owned by Syan's parents.

At dinner we were treated to -- among other things -- rice porridge fondu, pumpkin noodles with sugar and vinegar sauce to give them flavor, bitter melon, and oyster pancakes. We were also served steak after the American fashion, a concession, no doubt, to the western appetite. We also found the tomato rabbit appealing.  Among the signs of respect I noted were a chair with arms (the only one at the table) and a manager's toast in which the manager led his staff to my end of the table and drank to our health.

After dinner we went out for a walk near the hotel.  Some of the lighted buildings we had seen on our river cruise in 2011 are visible from the hotel.

We are directly below the pink tower on the left.  As in many cities, new building designs in the Chinese cities we visited incorporate light shows so that an outdoor stroll has an entertainment aspect to it. Even on this cold night in January, we found the square full of people -- couples, families, teenagers, older folks.


At the edge of this plaza where we walked to view these building were three gigantic transformers.  I am guessing that they stood 15 feet high.  They rotated their bodies and moved their arms, sending out colored light beams from different parts of their bodies.

Somehow I had gotten separated from our group, like a child wandering away from the adults to look at the pretty robots.  I wanted a picture for my grandson Toren, who is fascinated by such things. But my camera was already full and my unyielding laptop, not the traffic bandits, still held my memory card.