Two weeks ago I was there again, probably for the 100th time, strolling around the insanely beautiful neighbourhoods just north of the Pearl River, with their warrens of no-car streets, washing hanging out to dry, bougainvillea and unique “qi lou” (riding house) architecture. Two- floor houses in village style alleys right in the middle of a huge, mega-huge metropolis – where else can you find that? In China, I mean? Nowadays? Even two weeks ago everything was as it’s always been and Chinese New Year was finally over so all the people had returned, the myriad shops re-open for business in a big way.
I’ve sung the praises of Guangzhou before more than once in this forum, and was really looking forward to taking some important clients there this weekend.
I’m so naive! What only two weeks ago was beautiful Guangzhou at its finest is now: The biggest construction site on the planet. It started with the taxi stand right outside GZ East Station; it is no more. Now you have to walk 500 meters from the station to get a taxi because a large shopping mall is being built right outside the station. Yeah, when people get off the train they no longer will want to get a taxi, what they want to do is go shopping. With their large suitcases.
I should have known…
It got worse when I hit my favourite place on earth, the crazy wildness of tiny streets where only bicycles and hand-pulled trollies can go. Every house is now covered in tarpaulin and scaffolding to make it into this:
This house was one of the few that had kept the old doors and windows; most of them now had metal doors and windows with more metal bars than a high security prison.
This is obviously set in motion by the government; not that many house owners can have decided to turn their gaff into Alcatraz in one week. This can only mean one thing: Guangzhou is being spruced up for the ASIAN GAMES.
We hurried away from the city to find some respite in beautiful Yunfu two hours’ bus ride away. Since my clients had to get the 4.56 train back to Hong Kong today (we already had the tickets seeing my clients were flying out of Hong Kong early tomorrow morning) I thought leaving Yunfu at 12.30 would give us heaps of time. Get there 2.30, get the train at 4.56, oodles of time!
We hadn’t reckoned with the Asian Games. What only the day before had been a two hour bus trip now took three and a half hours because the road had turned into a nightmare with traffic jams starting about 40 kilometers outside Guangzhou proper and spreading all over the city – because they are making flower beds for the games.
Remember flower beds? Those which in the case of the Beijing Olympics caused people’s houses to be knocked down right up to the eve of the event to make way for flower beds so foreigners could look at “beautiful” flowers spelling out “Harmonious Beijing” and “China rules the world,” and whose incessant need for water meant that people in the surrounding provinces would have none?
That’s the one.
It seems the Chinese authorities will spare their citizens no end of inconvenience for six or seven months, to accommodate a two week (or whatever) event. It took that particular bus 35 minutes to even reach the bus station from what would have been a two minute walk if we’d been allowed off the bus.
As it was, we missed the 4.56 train by about an hour and a half (even if we had got there on time, the walk from the new, now distant taxi stand to the train station would have killed our schedule completely) and I had to buy new tickets as they wouldn’t transfer the 4.56 ones to the 6.15 train.
It is therefore with a heavy heart I have to tell you this: Don’t go to Guangzhou for about seven months. It’s not worth it to be sitting in a bus, taxi or anything for two hours to travel 15 kilometers. And as for those beautiful old houses and winding old streets – I was so naive fearing they would one day be razed to the ground to make way for highways and shopping malls. Now they’re being preserved to look like some kind of super-security morgues. Tiles on the outside, tiles on the inside, covered in metal bars and with every scrap of history peeled off with industrial-strength history-removing acid.
And again it’s a bloody sports fair that’s the culprit. I’ve said it before: Sports kill. Goodbye, dear Guangzhou, you were so good while you lasted.
Yesterday I had a lesson at home with one of my Lantau contingent, a shy girl called ah-Kei. A big part of my language teaching is trying to get people to understand that no matter →
So I have this book, right? Don’t Joke On The Stairs. The title is based on a sign I saw in Gansu once, in the staircase of a language school. “Avoid the exchange of jokes →
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.. an old podcast: A Sojourn in Shenzhen. Yes, one whole person has expressed interest in hearing it, so I must oblige. Also I happen to be going to Shenzhen again tomorrow as part of →
Oh, whoops, how did a burqa sneak in there? Must have been the word ‘black’. Anyway, so most of my students have the same complaint: No matter how good their Cantonese is, Hong Kong people →
Forget about Chinglish/Manglish; at least it’s funny. The worst English in the world has got to be corporate-speak: Corpselish. There’s a company that’s been spamming me for about a year now: CHaINA LIVE. My first →
I’ve just come back from another Russian lesson with the excellent Dimitri. People: You think Cantonese is difficult – try Russian. Every word, I mean noun, adjective, verb and adverb, has hundreds of different forms. →
So, last Friday, July 1st, I went to Victoria Park to check out the action and also make a podcast: Happy Jellyfish’s Outcast at 1st of July Extravaganza 2011 Oh, it was great. The carnival-like →
Friday I went to Victoria Park to see what the people are against this year. Many of them were very against Stephen Lam (林瑞麟）Lam Seui Leun, who they called a (something) dog. Not running dog, →
SO! That was the end of Naked Cantonese. Four years of laughter and tears, trying not to say “crap” on live radio, trials and tribulations, toilets and twits. Although I’ve only ever listened to one →
Last weekend again saw me in my beloved Shenzhen to shoot some of the last scenes for the upcoming Cantonese teaching DVD called DWD 2. Yes, the ultimate in the latest teaching technology, in colour. →
This week was my third week of Russian lessons, and although the teacher insists stubbornly on talking about Anna who is a ballerina and Anna and Maria being ballerini, I’ve decided to practise what I →
I learnt a new verb today. A taxi driver asked me “有冇 搶香蕉呀？" Yau mou cheung heung chiu ah? (something like that) – Have you CHEUNG bananas? I thought it meant ‘hoard’ but arriving at →
I was hoping I’d never have to write this (again) but here it is: My blog www.chinadroll.com has disappeared from view, and it’s SO not my fault. I was a customer of theirs for 3 →
To give or not to give up? Last week one of my students was almost … not close to tears exactly but … what’s the word? Oh yeah, ready to use a blunt weapon. She →
How to learn Cantonese: By doing the above. Carefully sliding down, into the water, then swimming. In my first post about this topic a couple of weeks ago I used the swimming analogy – how →
I think one of my biggest weaknesses is my temper, or rather that I sometimes can’t control it. I specifically blow my top at government officials and other puffed-up people in uniform, telling me what →
I’ve realised for many years now that learning a language, especially a language like Cantonese where the locals’ resistance to foreigners (Caucasians) acquiring their language can take on epic proportions sometimes, is about personality, not →
Wei, language enthusiasts everywhere, or should I say: Konichiwa! Or Bunka kakumei! (Cultural revolution) Yes, I’ve been to Tokyo （東京）and what a lovely trip it was. The air was so fresh, the train stations so →
Some people say – well, so what if Mandarin became the official language (or as the South China Morning Post in its endless contortions to please everybody twists it into, the “official dialect”) of Hong →
Woo-hoo! Finally there’s a podcast dealing only with Lantau issues, made by Lantau people like Carina (ah-Lin) (above)
Rudolf (ah-Dak)
and
Tony (ah-Lei).
OK, I admit it. I was planning on podcasts of five minutes tops. That’s all you young people of today can stand, I know! But it suddenly ended up as ten minutes. You’ve been warned. However, if you want to learn Cantonese, free and from scratch, this is the programme for you!
亞蓮 (Ah-Lin – Lotus)
亞德 (Ah-Dak – Virtue)
亞利 (Ah-Lei – Advantage)
嗰個人係四川人 (go go yan hai Sei Chyun yan – that piece person is Four River person, that person is from Sichuan)
嗰個人 (go go yan – that piece person). That should be pretty plain sailing by now. But how about ‘those people’? People is just 人 (yan), whether there are one million of them or just one. There is no plural of nouns in Chinese. But we differentiate between one and more than one by using the word 0啲 (di – some, more, -er) as in
嗰啲人(go DI yan – that SOME people, those people)
嗰啲人係四川人 (go DI yan hai Sei Chyun yan – that SOME people is Four River people, those people are from Sichuan)
嗰啲餓飲水 (go di o yam seoi – that some goose drink water, those geese are drinking water)
More about this tomorrow; yes there’s more!
