7-2

Wow. Guangzhou is pretty cool.

Our second air flight was totally uneventful as well. China Air Travel is 2 for 2 so far. The airport in Guangzhou was the first hint that we were in (or at least near) civilization again. There was actually a jetway, so we didn't have to get out of the plane and walk across the runway. (Some teenager and his GF were joyriding around on his scooter on the runway in Zhengzhou -- I think they chased him off eventually.) The airport was even air conditioned. There was a downside, of course -- as we were waiting at baggage claim, suddenly over the PA system came the Windows 3.1 ``Tada!'' startup sound. You could see all the Mac users in our group flinch. Every announcement on the PA afterwards was preceded by the Win3.1 ``Ding!'' sound. After 3 or 4 announcements, I was ready to tear those speakers out of the ceiling. If baggage claim runs under Windows, it does explain a lot of things, though...

(To be fair, I seem to recall that the high-tech baggage delivery system that gave them nightmares at the new Denver International Airport by misdelivering baggage, dumping it off the belts, grinding it between gears, etc, was controlled by a system running OS/2 Warp.)

After that, off to dinner. Amazing -- roads in Guangzhou are wide, people generally follow the rules and can make a decent speed, and there's much less honking. Bizarre. Dinner was good, much like American Chinese food, not unexpectedly. Lots of neon signs and billboards, reminding me very much of Tokyo.

We're staying at the White Swan hotel, with is very, very nice. Guess they want us to leave China with the best possible impression. We can rent a Rolls Royce here... tempting, but still expensive and it comes with a driver so you can't drive yourself. Oh well. Maybe next time.

Went out walking a bit last night here, but didn't find anything immediately interesting. Later my roommate got back -- ``Guess where I went?'' ``Huh? Where?'' ``McDonalds!'' I got directions and went out again and found it... It was true! McDonalds! I had a hamburger and a chocolate shake; both were okay but nothing special. The hamburger was exactly the same but the shake tasted odd. Still, it was a milkshake and it made me feel pretty good afterwards. Apparently there are 8 McDonalds and 5 Pizza Huts in Guangzhou now. Capitalism strikes again.

We hit the Bird and Fish Market today -- a reasonably well-known street market where vendors bring any and all kinds of animals to sell, mostly for food purposes. I walked through it last night, which was interesting. A lot of the vendors looked like they would show up in the evening and get their stalls ready and then camp out there on the street overnight. Odd. But they had some amazing stuff for sale. The normal birds and fish. Cuttlefish. Scorpions. Water cockroaches. Silkworms. Dogs and cats. Something I think we identified as muskrats. Snakes (of course). Turtles of all sizes -- you could get a 2-foot diameter turtle there, already de-shelled and ready to go. It was pretty interesting, but the smell took me back to Summers On The Farm in Kansas. I think there were some sections of the market that the guides deliberately did not take us through. After what we saw, what could they be selling there that would be that much worse?

Kittens for Sale. Tasty, no doubt.

For lunch we hit a Friendship Store and a few of us walked down to this other McDonald's, the first one in Guangzhou, I believe. It was BIG -- probably the biggest McDonalds I've ever seen. There were something like 15 to 20 registers, and the dining area was the size of a junior high gymnasium. They were doing good business, too. The five of us were the only white faces in the place -- even in McDonalds we stood out. It was McDonalds food all right, although much cheaper of course. $2 or so for lunch.

After lunch some folks headed back to the hotel and the rest of us went to a clinic for traditional chinese medicine, since some of the students had wanted to buy some of those medical dolls with all the acupuncture points marked. They showed us around and took us through a big song and dance about traditional chinese medicine. They took volunteers to undergo acupuncture treatments for whatever ailed them -- about 10 or 15 people were willing to try. Some of them didn't think it was effective, but some were very impressed. They had some guy who was supposedly this electrical chi-kung guy -- he could hook himself up to the wall outlet and light this little light bulb pressed against his skin. Uh... yeah. And they did the traditional method on us of diagnosing illnesses by checking the pulse and looking at our tongues. Turns out every one of us had something wrong with us, which required some of their special traditional chinese medication for $35 a bottle. That did not exactly go over too well. After we sat through all that, we found that they didn't have any acupuncture models for sale -- they only had one and they couldn't even show it to us. Our instructor was pissed, since we'd said ahead of time we were specifically looking for the models and they hadn't bothered to let us know they didn't have any until after they'd made their entire sales pitch. Left a bad taste in our mouths.

I'm not disparaging traditional chinese medicine. It may be very effective. However, what we got were sideshow tricks and a sales seminar.