We are definately not in Kansas

So the White Swan Hotel is an oasis in an otherwise hugely complex and confusing Chinese city. We are on the 24th floor and as far as you can see through the smog are buildings, cranes and traffic. This hotel is on what is called an island, but there are so many bridges to it that it hardly qualifies, but the island itself is part of the history of Guangzhou. This area was the French port back in the 1600’s and you can tell by the architecture: The buildings, the roads and the parks are all very European except that some of the store fronts are selling live grubs, eels and turtles.

On my run this morning I was thinking about the complexity of this city and it occurred to me that this city is 5 times as old as Boston. 2000 years this city has thrived as a commercial and industrial port on the Pearl River. There is no way I could even imagine understanding this city. On one of our trips off the island we traveled a good 10-12 city blocks and saw nothing but small storefronts selling hardware. Another section of city blocks had nothing but sewing machines. We asked our guide about it and she said that the entire city is that way, sections selling all of the same thing in hundreds of similar stores. Unlike cities in the states where each neighborhood has its own hardware store, here you have to travel to the hardware section of the city if you need a bolt to fix something. Although that simplifies it a bit, the reality is that a lot of these stores are wholesale operations where you buy 50,000 bolts at a time for you factory. The wholesale markets here are interesting, we went by the clothing wholesale market and people were hauling away huge bails of fabric and clothing undoubtedly heading for the US as Nike wear. A shocking amount of the transport of goods here seems to be done by bicycle.

We have yet to venture far from the hotel without our guide but we have a few down days coming up so I hope to get to a few of these markets to see what they are all about.

One more thought about being a goofy bald American here. When we are in the hotel there are 100 people just like me and 100 families just like us, but when we do drift away we are clearly in the minority. On my run this AM I went about 15 minutes up the banks of the Pearl River then turned around and I saw one person like me. Now, sometimes when you are a stranger in a strange land you are treated a bit as an outcast but not here, although there was not a sole around who looked like me or who was doing what I was doing, I was pretty much accepted as part of the landscape. We have found the people here in everything we have done to be quite nice and are either polite, ogle over Madi or just treat us like they would treat anybody else – with complete ambivalence. Beijing was not quite the same because I think they are used to tourists and have developed a system of hounding people to buy stuff, not here though, we have not met an aggressive sole since we have been in Guangzhou trying to sell me a Mao Tse-Tung watch (why would I want a Mao Tse-Tung watch?).