Guangzhou -- Starbucks still possible

We arrived in Guangzhou yesterday and we are staying in a youth hostel in a lovely neighbourhood on the river. Boy, do the chinese ever love neon. At least in Macau and here anyway. They have beautiful patterns all over the outside of the casinos in Macau in all kinds of colours of bright neon. Here in Guangzhou, we could see two huge buildings (20 storeys high) with neon facades from the restaurant last night. One building was made into a huge TV set by its neon and the other just had patterns which kept changing. There were also huge numbers of tour boats going by on the river with neon all over them. The opposite bank of the river had a retaining wall of which we could see at least 500 meters, all of it with travelling ribbons of neon running along it.

This could be any western city with a modern subway system. There are no more bicycles here than in Ottawa or Toronto. We had a rube's experience on the subway yesterday. We failed to notice the signs which indicated where we should have gone to change lines on the subway. We ended up going upstairs in the wrong place on an escalator which meant we would have to exit the whole subway system. The only way back down would be on the escalator we had just come up on. We gesticulated at the map on the wall to the security guard and showed him where we wanted to be. He actually stopped the escalator for us with a key so we could go downstairs and try again. Now that is service. It was all I could do to hold in my laughter till we got out of range.

We went to a really good museum today. Apparently they unearthed this tomb of an emporer of this region from about 100 BC when they were going to build something in 1983. It turned out to be a huge archeological find. They found 15 people who were sacrificed with the dead king. He was important enough to be buried in a 2000 piece jade suit which was impressive in itself. There were apparently several rooms packed with all sorts of common household stuff, musical instruments and treasures which were buried with him for the afterlife. Because it was discovered so recently, the archeological team was obviously top notch and the government protected everything and has displayed it really well in a beautiful purpose built museum around the original site.

The kids are happy that western food is still very much on the menu here and I have said that we really must quit going to every Starbucks we see. Actually we passed one before we went to the one we did this afternoon...