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Although I'm not going to go out and start building an ark, I'm actually a little worried about all of this rain that we're getting. It's basically been non-stop since we arrived here!
It hasn't really helped the touring aspect of our trip since most of it is outside. I'm trying to think of the good aspect of the rain but I can't. *thinks* At least it's been warm? Hmm, it's been quite sucky with all this rain actually. We can't even dry our clothes properly! (read: At all!)
Ah well, we're only here for a couple more days anyway. With our luck, it'll stop raining the moment we leave the city.
Anyway, I'm feeling a little lightheaded, so I think I'll keep this one short. No updates until I get back I guess (or unless I've got nothing else better to do).
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The plan today was to go to Guangzhou. We had a tour booked and planned to spend the entire day in the city. We had to get up around seven, and I (for some ungodly reason) got up before five. At least I had time to take a shower.
Oh yeah, it was raining. Again.
The ride in was fairly uneventful. There were a lot of rice paddy fields that we passed by, and a lot of large ponds for growing fish. The roads were okay, but all of the good roads were tolled. Pretty expensive too! (Ick.)
I noticed that our driver was constantly turning his wipers on and off throughout the trip. It was raining fairly inconsistently, and I guess that the van didn't have any intermediate settings for the windshield wipers. (Off, On, and High.) It was a little distracting, but there wasn't much else to do on the van.
When we reached Guangzhou, the first thing that came to mind was that it looked a lot like Montreal with the elevated highways and buildings. The city itself is actually quite large, but we were only there to see a few sites.
The first site was the new Olympic Stadium near the outskirts of town. It wasn't quite ready for use for events yet, but they had a section (on the other side of the building) where they were holding some sort of display on Mao and some model ships. Too bad it was all in Chinese or I might've learned something.
We went to lunch afterward as a fairly nice restaurant. It had pretty good food, and this really cute waitress.
Since it was still raining, we skipped on one of the spots and went to the shopping centre instead. Dear lord was it packed! The prices there were also quite high. It was basically a large modern shopping mall, although it doesn't rival the size of the Eaton Centre.
They had many traffic lights in Guangzhou, except people didn't obey them. throngs of people would cross the street on a green light, or amber light, or red light. Nothing stopped them. The cars literally had to part the ocean of pedestrians before being able to cross the street. Heck, even on streets without lights people were crossing in huge groups. It's a driver's nightmare!
Other interesting aspects.. *rubs chin* Well, they actually have U-turn lanes (in place of the left turn lane) in some places, and our van got rear-ended by a taxi on the highway. I have no idea was was going on, but our driver was in the fast lane, then pulled out one lane and stopped in the middle of the expressway. All I heard were the screeching of tires (from a couple of vehicles) and then the thunk as the bumpers collided. Well, apparently everything was fine so we continued on. *shrugs* *covers eyes*
We came back for dinner in one of the fancier restaurants, and I took a picture of a goat and some other animals in cages at the front of the restaurant (lambs to the slaughter?). I was going to pet the goat, but some guy shooed me away. I guess he didn't want me playing with someone else's food.
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