City of bridges

There's more bridges here than in Venice I reckon - I wonder if anyone has counted them? Here's a sprinking from a 5 kilometre stretch on the inner-ring road. I think I counted 12, but not all the photographs will fit.

Actually, we'd have to start be defining a bridge because what you can see on the left are really elevated roads, as in, hmm, we need another road so we'll just put one up here, outside your window. So they're  bridges in one sense, in that they go over things (roads), but I'm not sure how long a bridge-over-a-road can be before it has to change its name and be called a road. I mean, if it's a bridge over an ocean, I think it can be 70 kilometres long and still not have its identity under dispute. And certainly the Penang bridge is 13 kilometres long, and no-one is arguing about whether that is a bridge. But the fact that water is underneath it does seem to remove all doubt.

More of the same kind of phenomena, but note the passing pedestrians. Definitely a footbridge. But how long does a footbridge have to be to start wondering if in fact it is an elevated walkway? Guangzhou has some quite long ones.

Cars above and cars below. It's not actually possible to tell where this footbridge, if it is a footbridge, comes down to earth. Maybe it doesn't - Hong Kong for example is full of footpaths from the 4th floor of one building to the second floor of another.

The shiny buildings come into their own on these clear sunny days.

It's the second last day of autumn and the sky remains blue and the pollution remains low - mainly coming from the cars on this ring road.  You can see from this that it's a myth that Guangzhou is a sea of people. Bits of Guangzhou are awash with people. The road underneath this bridge, for example. Other bits aren't.

This bridge must be fairly new, because in the main, when possible, the footbridges are covered in plants or planter boxes. 

This is the kind of scene that has helped me warm to Guangzhou. OK, there is a lot of traffic. It's pretty much as bad as Sydney. But look at the trees! They didn't have these in 1990, but now, they're everywhere. (OK, maybe they were here in 1990, but if so, they were very very small) 

And you can see the creepers creeping across the bridge from each side. When they meet in the middle, it'll look something like this....

Pretty, isn't it?

Which Sydney pedestrian bridges look like this?

Economic crisis

Two stories related to the economic crisis:

• Every day the pollution is lessening.

• I went to the bank to transfer some money back to Australia. First you have to buy the AU$ - between the time the teller gave me the quote, and the time the two of us had finished the paperwork (about 40 minutes, they take paperwork seriously) the dollar had fallen sufficiently further that the teller had to give me change. Sufficient change, in fact, to compensate me for the Commonwealth Bank's outrageous charge for banking my money for me. ($15)

People

China is of course famous for having lots of people. Here are some of them. This is Beijing Rd, Guangzhou's slightly most famous shopping district. I prefer Up-and-Down Nine St. myself, but there isn't much to choose between them. I wouldn't actually buy anything in either place, unless I felt like some haggling practice.

Haggling is not actually a deeply fundamental necessity in much of Guangzhou - my art teacher, for example, won't let me pay him by the hour, or even by the class. He has a 6-step plan for me to learn to paint & and his scheme is to charge me for each step, no matter how many classes & hours each step takes. I however know my talent is more than somewhat limited - I can't possibly allow this or the guy will be traveling for two hours every weekend for no return. He may think there is no-one unteachable - but I can still remember years of swimming lessons to no avail. And I have a dim feeling I may have failed art in about Year 6 or 7.

So anyway, haggling is not necessarily essential elsewhere but here it is. It is absolutely essential. I have heard a local start off at 10% of the asking price and settle on about 25%. It's pretty extreme. Furthermore, I have to say some of the stuff is beyond complete rubbish. I've seen watches here for about 20 RMB, and even if I got them for 5 RMB I'd still guess they were overpriced.

None of this deters anybody, as you can see. Indeed, it doesn't even deter me. If you stay off the main drag there's lots of good things around.

I may have mentioned Beijing Rd previously as it is an example of "public archaeology", something I think China is getting really very good at. (My photos didn't come out though, it's not so easy to photograph through glass). Not visible here, but slightly north & south on this strip of road, excavations have uncovered roadway going back to the Tang (400-ish CE), Song (1100-ish), Yuan (1300-ish) and Ming (1400-ish). These have been restored & encased in glass so they are permanently on display in the busiest place in downtown Guangzhou. There are also fragments of city wall and city gate in the southern section. Other places still have their walls intact (Xi'an being a particularly spectacular example, but Zhaoqing locally as well), but the cost of keeping a wall intact is that what is under it cannot be seen. The interest of this exhibition (quite apart from the ingenuity of the presentation) is the visibility of the layers from 4 dynasties. The Nan Yue palace has the same impact, although it has maybe 8 or 9 layers. But it would be a pity to restore just one of them thoroughly and thus lose the rest. For those like me who are imagination-challenged, seeing the multiplicity of fragments from the multiple historic periods is immensely valuable. Each fragment functions as a kind of frame in a film, and viewed together they create the impression of continuity.

I find that Guangzhou provides me repeatedly with that feeling of continuity. Maybe I should say that I find myself musing on issues of continuity a lot while I'm in Guangzhou.

This on the other hand is Shenzhen. I never find myself musing about much in Shenzhen. (Cue pun) This is not the most crowded the street gets - that happens around about 6 PM, but it gives you a fair idea. There's more serious begging here than around Guangzhou as well. Somewhere off-camera is a girl aged between 5 & 15 (depending on nutrition) who specialises in holding on to a spinning wheel by her teeth. Not a dependable way of making a living, but she is one of many buskers. Except the buskers don't look quite as well fed as they do on Circular Quay.

People in Shenzhen tell you they could never live in Guangzhou because it's not safe. I live in Guangzhou and NOWHERE in Guangzhou makes me check my pockets and hold on to my bag like here. The only reason there aren't pickpockets (if there aren't; my feeling is just that I haven't met them yet) is the large number of public security officials hanging around.

No doubt there's someone from Shenzhen writing the same thing about Beijing Rd.

Autumn arrives

So what, you may ask? Well, it's nearly winter and we're all still sweltering in 98% humidity and high 20's. The swimming pool's closed (and empty, so no point climbing the fence), there isn't aT-shirt in the shops (although you can stock up on left over stock at wholesale prices anywhere that is selling them, if you feel you can take the fashion risk of being out of it next year. Needless to say the remainder tables are surrounded by crowds of not women). Autumn fashion is just about on its way out the door as well with winter only weeks away. Autumn's absence has been causing tension all over town.

The other thing about autumn is very strong winds cleans the air even better than the mid-summer rains.
To wit, you've certainly seen that building before if you've been paying attention, but in no photo previously taken my me in Guangzhou has the sky ever looked like that. I mean, that's a proper sky, guv. Wi' clouds an' evrything. Really. No tricky play with digital editing, just azure.

You can see the clouds better in the next one on - I know the sky is a different colour, but that's due to trick photography. I was practising ways to trick the fully automatic exposure controls, and I have found one.


Even that extremely annoying gold building looks OK under a sky this strongly coloured.



(more to come)








This guy will be happy too. Obviously that isn't the world's largest block of peanut brittle right at this minute, but some time in the recent past it surely was. last weekend that was going to melt if he didn't finish his deliveries by about 10:00 am. This weekend he can probably switch to retail around 11 o'clock and make some extra money.

Also, cycling today is the kind of thing you might think about doing for pleasure. Last weekend it was something you would do to lose weight, or because you had no choice.


It's not unambitious, is it?

Imagine how devastated you'd be if you fell off the bicycle (happened to me once going down Williamstown Road when the chain jumped off the sprocket). Or how angry you'd be if some idiot ran into you. Twenty years ago if you'd been doing this (and no-one actually was that I saw, which might be a whole other discussion) it would have been a bicycle but now it'd be about 50:1 on it would be a car. They don't call it brittle for nothing.

It's tempting to think that there is something a little idyllic about a world where you can earn a living selling peanut brittle from the back of a bicycle - that's the "real China" that everybody is worried might be vanishing. But think about that guy's stress. Take a look at his back - it's the back of a man who is worried about many things. OK, it might be the plummeting value of his share portfolio - but I think the balance of probabilities is against it.