Merry belated Christmas and happy 2014! According to the
traditional Lunar year, here in China it’s the year 4711 - and soon to be 4712!
It was certainly peculiar spending Christmas away from home,
raising levels of homesickness to a new high. However despite this Christmas in
China was great! But it would be falsehood if I was to say I fully experienced
the ‘christmas spirit’ within the snowless, sunlit alien surroundings.
First thing in the morning I went to meet Yinzi for a KFC
breakfast of heroic proportions, in a pretty cool area of Guangzhou called Gangding
which specialises in electronic goods etc. Just outside of the KFC was a
display of Christmas trees with creepy jazz santas and all that, but other than
that there was little to no sign of Christmas amongst the urbanscape.
It dawned on me by then that Christmas in China was not
going to ever feel like a full on traditional one. Therefore, I realised that
for the day to work I must embrace the obscurity and try to make it as much of
a bizarre and puzzling set of events for Christmas as possible – so I paid a
second visit to the temple of 6 banyan trees!
It certainly felt a bit odd walking into a Buddhist temple
during a Christian holiday, with my colourful Christmas jumper on display
amongst the Buddhist monk robes…
Nonetheless, it was peaceful, kind of like
Christmas!...however when we left the gates of the temple onto the busy street
of stalls, a police car parked up. Suddenly, a mass of vendors pulling their
stalls on wheels began to run down the street towards us – one of two rather
terrifying occurrences in the day involving a mass of people charging at me.
Then we visited Shamian island – an area of the city which
still displays remnants of the occupation of Guangzhou (then Canton) by the British
empire.
Apart from a few encounters, Christmas had been a very
relaxed and slow paced day as far as life in Guangzhou goes! To finish off, I
wanted to take Yinzi to Pizza Hut for a (very ‘romantic’) meal – which turned
out to be a bit tricky….
Most Chinese people don’t really celebrate Christmas like
the west does – however – if there’s ever a reason to go out for a family meal,
they’ll take it. So everywhere, absolutely everywhere (from checking around 5
locations within the city) had a queue extending out of every restaurant
entrance – and not just a standard UK queue, but monstrous ‘China
over-population’ queues. The malls were packed with shoppers taking advantage
of the Christmas sales, which led to my second scary occurrence of the day.
As we waited to cross the road to enter a shopping mall at
Tiyu Xilu, a huge crowd (and I can’t emphasise the word ‘huge’ enough, taking
up the wide paths and extending out onto the road) formed on each side of the 4
lane road. The traffic lights took some time before showing the green light,
releasing a wall of death reminiscent of the Bring me the Horizon gig at
Sonisphere 2010 (x 10). People weren’t just hitting me with their shoulders,
but instead directly walking into me – on 2 instances almost causing me to lose
my glasses. Me and Yinzi held onto each other for dear life, and managed to
survive.
We eventually found a pizza place (with not too bad of a
queue) and had a lovely meal! A stressful taxi drive followed to return and
call my parents for the first time on skype since I came to China – which was a
lovely ending to the day.
Christmas in Guangzhou was tremendous overall!...but not
without it’s chaos. So when New Years came along, we opted for celebrate lying
in bed – which was the wise choice I think.
The excitement doesn’t end – it’s my birthday next week! To
celebrate I’m going on a week-long trip to Sichuan with my chum Kexiong! We
shall stay in Chengdu and visit some awesome sites, including: Mount Emei,
Leshan Giant Buddha, Mount Qingcheng, and what Sichuan is famed for – Giant
Pandas! I’m insanely excited to finally go exploring more deeply through the lavish land of China!
Zai’jian!
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