They let us in

...despite me wearing a T-shirt that is almost definitely offensive in the People's Republic of China. Allow me to explain... During Lunar New Year, red is very much the colour to wear here in China - it represents good luck for the coming year. This year is the year of the pig. I like T-shirts that have foreign languages on them, especially when the language is written in an unfamiliar script. I do not have anything red in my 'wardrobe'. So when, at the New Year's fair near our hostel in Hong Kong, I saw a pretty cool red T-shirt with a picture of a pig's head on it and some Chinese writing, I thought - perfect, I'll have that. The pig is dressed in army uniform.
Since we weren't sure we could trust the vendors to translate the Chinese correctly for us, we thought we'd take the T-shirt to our farewell meal with Steven and his family to make sure it didn't say anything that might stop us getting through the border, like, I don't know, Commies are r*bbish. (Who knows what risks I'm taking writing that here in this blog!). Steven and co confirmed what the vendors had said - the message says something like "Every day learn something new / every day make progress". So no worries there. Our hosts did seem concerned however that the Chinese might not be too amused by the portrayal of Chairman Mao as a pig in the picture........

I tried to send it home from Hong Kong - no go, the Post Office was closed for New Year. So I wore it under another T-shirt as I crossed the border. No doubt being a little over-cautious, but I didn't fancy explaining the above to a uniformed and armed border patrolman. Now I look at the picture, I feel stupid for not spotting it myself... So anyway, we crossed into the People's Republic without incident.

Guangzhou is a bit of a big mess of a place to be honest. After the Westerner-friendly, compact and easily navigable Hong Kong Island, it just seemed to be an endless sprawl of buildings of various heights, with no obvious landmarks, and almost no apparent tourist infrastructure. That's not necessarily a bad thing, after all we are trying to get off the beaten track, but it would have been nice to have a decent map to help us get around. Thank god for the recently built metro or we would have spent most of our time being ripped off by taxi drivers.

Street scene in Guangzhou

Still, we were staying on a little island on the river, in a fairly central location, which was a peaceful haven away from all the traffic and the people. Man, there are a lot of people in China. You may have known that, but it still hits you. And this is a quiet time, when lots of the migrant workers are back in the sticks with their families for New Year. We didn't do a great deal in our three days in Guangzhou - mostly just a wander round the streets, trying in vain to find a nice teahouse to sit down in, eating pretty well as usual (our Chinese is still terrible but we are making progress with food vocab), and watching one of the 40-odd channels in our ridiculously comfortable en-suite hostel room, just 12 pounds a night between us. Some of the many epic kung fu monk dramas (how else can I describe them?) had English subtitles, which as you can imagine were pretty amusing.