Day 16 - Guangzhou

Guangzhou had me very excited. It is the capital city of Guangdong province, where my family comes from. Sadly, we didn't visit the North-Eastern cities where my particular language is spoken, but it was culturally and linguisticly closer to me than the rest of the mainland was. Anyways, we visited a parc that held a statue of 5 goats, shown here with our guide. The goats have some mythological importance. In the parc, everyone was playing with a Jianzi, it looked so fun that almost everyone in our bus bought one.
While driving around, I noticed that people hung their laundry pretty much EVERYWHERE and we saw what is surely the TRUE eigth wonder of the world, The Man With At Least 16 Boxes On His Bike. It was just incredible to see him biking with all that mass on his bike and somehow maintaining balance while getting off and walking his bike across the street. Etienne didn't see him. We visited the Chen ancestral home which was exciting because that would make it also MY ancestral home. And in fact, it was cool for about 30 minutes but then our guide dove into explicit detail behind the symbolism of every little architectural and cultural detail, and that got boring very quickly.
Our hotel was amazing; we got a huge suite on the 45th floor of Guangzhou's second tallest building. Needless to say, the view was spectacular. Lunch was at a restaurant by the Pearl River where we ate some very familiar dishes and I took the opportunity to take some pictures of members of our tour.
At night, we visited another commercial street and ended up at KFC where I tried their black pepper sauce chicken sandwich. American chains are about 1/2 price in China (which is really expensive when you can get a bowl of noodles for next to nothing), have lots of seating space, and some items that have a more local flavour. Not much else happened in Guangzhou, we had a crappy supper, visited some super expensive stores (including 1 that had 10$ spoon holders WITHOUT the chopstick bridge), and took a boat to Hong Kong.
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