09/03/10

11:00 PM

So, it seems I underestimated my own family monumentally. For our last full day in Guangzhou, we had a family dinner at a restaurant not too far from the village. Imagine my surprise when I walked in and realized we occupied five tables of ten each:

Everyone in that photograph is in our family, descended from the same grandfather unless they married in! My family could be a part of a campaign for why China needs the one-child rule. Understand I have quite a few relatives in the States as well.

Southern China… different from Beijing, in so many trivial ways!

- Everyone washes their rice bowl and teacup out with tea and then empties it into a large bowl provided for this purpose. Sometimes this ritual is distressingly necessary. Generally, it’s for peace of mind. Food is then consumed out of the rice bowl, and bones are discarded onto the small plate underneath (which is considered dirty).

- There aren’t many foreigners. I kept a White Person Count for my four days in Guangzhou; at the end WPC=1. My guess is the Cantonese scares away the foreign exchange students.

- Lots more neon lights and garish signs. According to my dad this is because Cantonese people, out of the vast collection of people with tacky taste that is China, are the tackiest.

My aunt bought this green tea flavored toothpaste in Zhongshan. This appears to be the dominant toothpaste brand in southern China, Hong Kong, and Macau. Does anyone else find it absurdly offensive, or am I just hypersensitive?

After a few days visiting family in Sac Tou, my dad, brother, aunt and I went with one of my cousins from Macao to Hong Kong for a day and a half, and to Macao for half a day. Hong Kong: pretty, vertical, tacky, neon. We stayed on the Kowloon side in the tiniest hotel room imaginable; worse, we were three women sharing two doll-sized beds. But the lunch more than compensated. The dim sum! I love good dim sum and I know good dim sum, and I’d never had anything as delicately made as what we had there. We did a little touring, but frankly I hate tours and there was nothing in the tour that was too interesting. The city was pretty though:

The next day, Macao: the Vegas of Hong Kong. We had even less time here than Hong Kong, and in a rather silly move, we spent an amount of it walking through a near-exact replica of the Venetian from Las Vegas (I didn’t mind: air conditioning). I met my 74- year old aunt here. Afterwards, we all went out to Portuguese food for dinner. I hadn’t realized Macau shared a land border with China; it does and we drove back to Zhongshan. The weather had been clear for the past 3 days, but this day, it was torrential.

Today, we flew to Shanghai.

Today’s Chinglish of the Day goes nicely on my list of terrible Chinese pick-up lines. On a paper towel dispenser in the airport ladies’ room: “Please put out vertically.”

Dang, Shanghai, you need to step up your game. It ain’t gonna be that easy when we’ve only just met!