All Will Salute Me
Trip Start
May 22, 2005
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80
107
Trip End
Jan 22, 2006
Shunde, Foshan, Nanhe and Guangzhou, Guangdong Province,
China
Thursday, November 10, 2005
The ferry took us to Shunde where Mr. Poon picked us up from the ferry terminal. Mr. Poon runs a business in Guangdong and maintains a home in Vancouver. The traffic in China is pretty lawless and Mr. Poon drives like he is participating in a police chase. The day he picked us up the "police" must have been close. On our way to the hotel, during one of his violent unannounced lane changes, Mr. Poon rear ended a lady on a moped, knocking her onto the pavement. We were horrified. Mr. Poon calmly called one of his minions to come and take his place before the authorities arrived on the scene. In China, perhaps more than most countries, money talks and Mr
Home Village
. Poon has money. Unfortunately, his minion arrived too late to assume responsibility for the accident, but Mr. Poon was still able to leave the scene with a curt wave. We were relieved to see that the lady only suffered some minor scratches.Mr. Poon kindly arranged for Paul to visit his ancestral village-Bei Jiao. What was a village is now a highly industrialized city. Regardless, it was quite thrilling to trace your roots back to the "village" where your grandparents were born.
In Vancouver, the Chinese restaurants have a few tanks in the front containing live fish, crabs and lobsters. In China, the restaurants have entire rooms filled with tanks containing everything in the sea. We visited a restaurant that had live sea snakes and sea turtles. Nobody ordered the sea turtle, but we did sample the sea snake and had a delicious worm omelet. Mr. Poon was quite impressed with our iron stomachs.
Paul's dad is a very picky eater, but one of his favourite dishes is "double skin" milk. This now makes sense because Shunde is famous for its double skin milk. In Shunde the dish is made with fresh buffalo milk that is transported daily by bike in order to minimize jostling
Road Sign to Bei Jiao
. The delicious sweet milky concoction that is produced from the buffalo milk is magnificent.After a few days, Mr. Poon handed us off to Mr. Lee who hosted us in his hometown of Nanhai. Mr. Lee is a very talented golfer and he happily took Paul and Mel's Dad to play the local golf courses. Golfing in China is quite an experience. The abundance of cheap labour makes it so that everyone has a caddie. The caddies are usually females who have a perfect command of all the English golf phrases. The attention is so ridiculous that there is even a person in full uniform at the front gate whose only job is to salute you as you drive through. Paul's game was rusty to say the least and he lost an embarrassingly large number of Mr. Lee's new Titleist Pro V1s. The sad part of Guangdong Province is that it is highly polluted. The smog is constant and on what should have been beautifully sunny days the sun was actually blotted out by the ever-present layer of pollution. Industry in China has grown at a mad pace and the environment is clearly paying the price.
The hotels that we stayed at during this leg of the trip were relatively high end. Our hotel in Nanhai must have been frequented by rowdy businessmen, because in our room there was a detailed listing of the replacement cost of every conceivable item in the room. Toilet - 2,000 yuan; bath tub - 5,000 yuan. You have to party pretty hard to break a toilet.
We ended our visit to Guangdong Province with day trips to Foshan, Paul's Dad's birthplace, and Guangzhou for a day of shopping at the counterfeit market-everything's fake, down to the replica branded bags they put your "nikes" into.
Our trip to China left us with a deep appreciation of our heritage and culture. Seeing the poverty that still plagues much of China made it so much clearer to us how brave, industrious and loving our parents were to carve out such a blessed life for us.
