Tag: lowu

Another several skipped blogs

I might have graduated recently, but I can’t find anyone to confirm it. I hope I graduated.

I’m done with exams now, too, and I should be done with undergraduate education entirely. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do between now and the 12th. There are some nice domestic airfares in China, and there’s always the train. But what about Japan and the Philippines? Tricky.

I completely omitted mentioning my trip to Yangshuo, near Guilin in Guangxi province on the weekend before last. I went up with Catherine, François, and Betsy. We stayed at a place called Yangshuo Culture House, where the wonderful Wei kept us well-fed and well-oriented. Yangshuo is famous for its limestone hill scenery, which you can see in my pictures. We went to the Water Cave, climbed Moon Hill, went bamboo rafting on the Yulong, and generally wandered around. Wei’s family supplied ridiculous breakfasts and dinners, including some stuffed chilis I’m still missing.

The trip included two sleeper buses: one from near Luohu to Guilin (we got off at Yangshuo and skipped Guilin entirely, on the advice of almost everybody), and one from Yangshuo to a bus station a good way west on Shenzhen metro line #1. The second was a bit nicer, but had a less flexible design which involved essentially trapping my feet in a box.

My Yangshuo album will get bigger after I steal some pictures from the others. 4558

After Yangshuo, I wrote another paper and took my final exams. I’ve also been getting to hit my local food favorites pretty hard (Thai from Gold Dragon, Vietnamese from Mini Paris, and South Asian from Tuen Mun Curry House). I will miss the HK$22 set lunch from the curry house and the HK$20 moan, but I’ll miss the crack-laced HK$30 red curry from Gold Dragon even more.

On Saturday my former co-worker and brief housemate Jeff arrived in Hong Kong, and I spent a couple days showing him around—not nearly long enough for Hong Kong, but better than most of you reading this are doing, right? Today I met him at Sheung Shui and crossed to Mainland with him, where I pointed him to the airport bus and picked up a cheap suit and shirt I’ve been having worked on at Luohu Comm. Ctr. The suit is definitely of lower quality than the one I had made in TST, but at a third of the price that’s to be expected. The shirt, though, is just fine: I might e-mail for a couple more, now that they have my measurements.

People are leaving. That’s really sad. I hope I get to say goodbye to more properly this semester, but the departure dates are even more spread-out: some are gone already, and many are leaving before we get kicked out of our housing on the 23rd.

Don’t ask me where I’ll be on the 23rd; I can barely answer for tomorrow. There’s this really cheap flight from Guangzhou to Xi’an I’ve got my eye on…

Arrived in Beijing

A short departure from NYU (my last post) is Beijing. My flights back over were moderately delayed but otherwise passable, a sure sign that I’ve crossed the Pacific too much (three times, but once might have been enough). I got back late on Monday night, barely made it to campus before the public transport switched over to night mode, and suffered for two days stubbornly trying to get over the lag. HK is really chilly lately… not much warmer than Beijing, so far.

Had a moderate adventure yesterday flying out of Shenzhen. I was stuck in traffic on the HK side for about an hour on the bus to Sheung Shui, but the crossing itself was faster than a normal weekend crossing: probably a combination of overstaffing and crossing on the holiday instead of the day before. The Y20 airport bus (and waiting in line) were worth it… the airport’s really far from Luohu. It’s big, and pretty modern (except for the squat toilets), and the inflated prices for food don’t look too bad if you’re coming from Hong Kong. There’s a cross-airline e-ticket self-check-in (genius!)—this probably works since all the airlines are part of CAAC. Met up with Betsy there, ate, killed time, boarded. I guess we were delayed a while on the tarmac but I was too tired to care that much. The Hainan Airlines (HU) flight was on a pretty new 737-800, and since I got on quickly enough to claim overhead space I was actually fine for legroom in coach. Dinner and two beverages served: I had chicken, it was about what I’d expect from a Chinese airline meal.

Beijing’s airport is relatively free of taxi touts, etc. I caught the Y16 shuttle bus #2 to Xidan Aviation Hall and a cab (with the help of some phoning for directions) for Y16 from there to my hostel, Red Lantern House. I’m in a 4 bed dorm. It’s a little noisy but decent so far, with slightly softer beds than LN (read: hard). They’ve done amazing things with their courtyard/restaurant area: hopefully my pictures come out, but it looks really nice. There are a few other Lingnanians in Beijing right now but I think I’m the only one with fully-working texting, so it looks like I’m (at least mostly) on my own for a few days.

Dafen oil painting village

I will be a little repetitive in this entry to try to get some information into search engines, as I had a heck of a time finding any beforehand.

This past Saturday I (and three tutors: Nicole, Nicholle, and Chloe) visited Dafen, a “village” in the greater Shenzhen area.  Shenzhen, for the uninitiated, is the shady border town of 10 million pressing on the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s mainland border.  Reaching this border from Lingnan is most easily done by catching bus 261 across the road from campus and riding to Sheung Shui KCR, where one can change for the one-stop-18-HKD East Rail ride up to Lo Wu.  You’ll need a visa, though, and a multiple-entry one if you don’t want to completely waste an entry on Shenzhen.

BEA bank cards didn’t seem to be working on the Mainland side of Luohu that day, but my American card has worked in those machines just fine in the past.  You will want RMB (renminbi) / Chinese Yuan, as these are now worth a little more than HKD and the days of Shenzhen-ers accepting HKD at par may be over for good soon.  Some Y1 coins (or notes) will be useful for the bus fare.

Though it’s in the Shenzhen… big whatever-it-is zone, it’s outside of the Special Economic Zone and a nice bottlenecky internal border.  Dafen (or Da Fen, or 大芬) village, Buji town, Longgang District, Shenzhen City.  You can reach it by local bus 106 from Luohu (3 RMB) or, I’m told, by taxi.  We took the bus, which you too can take by walking straight away from the border on the side of Luohu Commercial City (the big mall) and the coach station (right side of the big square) until you reach the local bus terminus.  It took about 30 or 40 minutes inbound, but on the way back we got clobbered by traffic from the SEZ border on, and it took us maybe a bit under two hours to make it back to Luohu.  Dafen ain’t no village, though: it’s more of a gated development surrounded by respectable-sized buildings.

It’s famous for replicas of Western art, often made in an assembly-line fashion, but we didn’t see that much of that.  Instead, we saw a lot of… more “Thomas Kincaidey” work, according to Nicholle.  There were some very interesting lacquer works and vases and… well, lots of artsy things, really.  All very nice, if you have a house (or even an apartment) to decorate, but not so good for me to buy.  Another widely-reputed Dafen product is the “oilshop,” where an artist puts you, your family, or your friends or victims into a scene of your choice.

There was a pretty good selection of politicians, from the obvious (Mao) to the surprisingly fresh-faced (George W. Bush, after drinking from the Fountain of Youth).  I am thinking of commissioning a portrait of 2008 US presidential contenders in Last Supper style, but I don’t know if they’ll all fit behind the table.

We had lunch at a little hole-in-the-wall dumpling place, where four large trays of dumplings and a bowl of noodles, meats, vegetables, and peanuts cost us 十七元 (17 RMB—I actually understood the Mandarin we were quoted, which was nice).

After our exhausting return (though there won’t be any signs to tell you, you can catch bus 106 back to Luohu at a stop roughly across the street from the one where you hopefully worked out that it was time to get off), we sat down for drinks in LCC.  A milk tea later, I was rushing down the East Rail to Causeway Bay for a dinner.  I think the girls were looking at tailors in LCC.  Good trip, and the start of a full day for me.  I hope that this entry will make it into Google and make it possible to find information like the Dafen bus number more easily, but if you have any questions about visiting Dafen from Hong Kong get in touch with me and I will try to help you.

“Shenzhen embraces the world !”

There is little detail because I have to spend my time on a childish “course journal” for a final-year politics course. Grumble, grumble.

As I suspected, I ended up gawking around Shenzhen on Wednesday instead of taking a bus to Yangshuo.

The border fortifications between the HKSAR and the Mainland are just as imposing as they’ve been hyped up to be.

I took the metro (with nifty electronic tokens like Bangkok) out near the end of the line and surfaced in an alternate reality: the “Overseas Chinese Town” development. It was pretty nice, leafy, uncrowded, etc. All cars, very few bikes. Private bus network. Not gated though, as far as I could tell.

Going to Wal-Mart in China is one of the more unexpected surreal experiences I’ve had. I’ll post more about that when I deal with the pictures.

I’m keeping it simple now: no travel until Tuesday when I fly to Bangkok and do my first solo backpacking since 2004.