Oddments

No photographs this week, not well organised.

Went into Hong Kong on Tuesday - for a cup of coffee! The builder from Ability/AGMate, Gary, was in Hong Kong visiting family and couldn't arrange a visa. So I dropped in to meet him. From Shenzhen it's fairly easy. At the main railway station you walk South into a building which turns ouit to be the border. 30 minutes, 2 queues and not much paperwork later, you are in Hong Kong. The border itself is a moat with razor wire fences, but you walk over it. Borders are unpleasant places, essentially a reminder of the species' continuing (and growing) inability to collaborate. This border is not so vicious now, but the memory of the past is there. In 1990 Hong Kong is where most of the population of Guangzhou - well, most of the population that I saw on the street - wanted to be. I bet there are still a lot who feel thed same way.

Anyway, once across the border I decided to try and work out how to get back - not as easy as you might think. Exit from China is on the 2nd floor & re-entry is on the 1st (ground) floor and there is no connection between them, except the railway. So I had to catch a train one station into HK, to Sheung Shui, and catch up with Gary there. There is one restaurant at Sheung Shui station with A/C and it looks like it was making a fortune out of people doing just this. One noticeable difference with HK from Guangdong is that EVERYBODY in HK speaks Cantonese, as opposed to many in GD. In Shenzhen, due to the migrant nature of the place, Mandarin is actually pretty common. Not much to say about Sheung Shui - I may be doing it a disservice but it appeared to be an old people's home and a geriatric hospital combined. Not the shiny part of Honkers, that's for sure.

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Coming back from Shenzhen on Thursday the train was packed so I shared my table in the dining car with a mother and son (it's the school holidays). I have never, and this is despite many years working in inner-city pubs in Melbourne, seen one person with so many form guides. Halfway through the trip out came the mobile phone, a new form guide emerged from the handbag and bets were laid. Sadly, I didn't get to see or hear the result.

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I was in a bookshop on Sunday. I previously thought I had seen a crowded bookshop during the May day public holiday, but in fact I was wrong. Stocking up on materials to keep the children entertained - although the entertainment looked suspiciously educational in many cases - during the school holidays, dedicated parents and grandparents stood in queues 20 or 30 people long. Average height of the stack of materials purchased - around 15 cms.

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I have decided that there is definite escalator nervousness at a fairly high level in the Guangzhou community. I don't know what this means - for all I know there is an fatal escalator accident daily (thinks, must start buying the tabloids). Perhaps it just balances out the super confident queue-jumpers. I've noticed something else about escalators here as well; they move! Not just up and down. At the East Railway station (which has 5, count them, five, Starbucks) the up escalator at exit D suddenly became the down escalator. Not suddenly suddenly as in while I was on it, but between last week's visit and this week's. It is very awkward. I used to collect the newspaper from the vendor at the bottom with my free left hand & now I have to shift my bags to the left hand so I can collect it with my right hand. It's not really safe to actually stop for the paper in the morning rush hour. Still, I'm pretty sure that no other escalators that I have dealt with have suddenly changed their character in this way.

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There are a lot of demonstratively affectionate young people - as in school uniform young - on the subways at the moment. The numbers reflect the school holidays. The demonstrativeness, I was informed today, reflects the recent and rapid Westernisation of Guangzhou. It is disconcerting for those aged 30 and above (well, that's what my 30 plus Chinese teacher told me). She said the current generation gap is about 5 years.

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I have just realised - really - that a camera is the opposite of a mirror. That's why my head is never straight in photographs. I wonder how many other people have taken 50 years to work that out?