Rain

And that was a quiet week, due mainly to the fact that I was preparing a paper to give at a conference next week and that my computer broke down, rendering preparation a slow & painful process. It did in fact rain all week, every day and multiple times on most, but that actually doesn't really stop anyone doing much. It's not cold rain, it's just wet and when you get out of it you gently steam dry in short order. Strange to look out the window at what could easily be an English winter mizzle (half mist, half drizzle) and then walk out into an indisputable summer.



The rain is very unseasonal, so everybody is talking about global warming.



I did get out during the week to have a look at Jinan University, which is Guangzhou's major international university (meaning it can accept international undergraduates on the basis of their domestic university entrance exams - wonder if my life would have been different if it had been open in 1976?). It has teaching space for 50,000 students, but current enrolment is somewhat less. On-campus dormitory space is the big problem. It's a very big campus, the dormitory "suburbs" are intertwined with some of the academic buildings and there is plenty of open space as well. It looks like a good place to spend 4 years or so.



Sunday I finally managed to get to the "copy markets"; these are a group of wholesale and retail markets and sweatshops where you can pretty much buy any brand of clothing, or get it made for you at what can only be described as ridiculous prices. If you paid $10 you would probably have paid too much. I bought 6 items of clothing for the same price as the first 2 items I bought in this city at what I was then told was the cheap place to buy things. A vote of thanks to David, an expat Adelaidean I met in Starbucks over a technical discussion about whther Starbucks IT, WIndows, or a malicious universe was to blame for our inability to connect to the internet. (The answer turned out to be... Windows!) He told me the upmarket locals usually avoid the copy markets becasue they (the locals) are obsessed by brands, but that in his view (and he is an importer) there is absolutely no difference in manufacturing quality, and even if there were, paying 1/6 the price makes up for the occasional failure. Since I know someone in Melbourne who used to sew Adidas, Nike, Puma and Kmart labels on exactly the same tracksuit pants and resell them accordingly, I have no trouble in believing this.



The copy markets are down near the main railway station, which is where I first stepped on mainland soil in 1990. They have a built a mid-level and a high-level expresssway through the middle of the district since then, and I can only say it has still improved it dramatically over 1990. The greening of Guangzhou that is the major difference between then and now has also taken hold there as well. I'm guessing that it's still a pretty rough and tough area though; railway station terminus + wholesale markets is not a formula for upmarket tourist destinations. The hotels here are catering for the budget business traveller - flying in to set up the next season's orders. And there were lots of them, from Europe and Africa. I heard Czech, Serb, German, Italian, French (Mozambique), at least one African language, English and none of them were tourists. I know the stuff here is cheap, but how much of it do you have to resell in Africa to make a business? Surely it can't be that expensive there? And if I understood that mystery, then I'd be in the business.



I didn't take a lot of photos this week, but take a look at this one:

It's a job advertisement for one of the restaurants in my building. Waiters, kitchen hands and dishwashers start at 900 RMB per month, roughly $150. Free board and lodging is thrown in, which makes it a substantially better deal, becasue rent in this part of town is from the stratosphere. But the free food is somewhat undercut by the "Only people with a good attitude who are prepared to work hard" section of the advertisement. The Chinese idiom for "work hard" is "eat bitterness". Free bitterness, eh? Doesn't sound quite so compelling.

Most of the quality restaurants have a permanent ad outside looking for staff. This one doesn't have height restrictions (well, shortness restrictions, really), but is otherwise typical.

The bitterness diet is obviously is not one that people acquire a taste for.