Hey Hey and a Big G'Day toya,
 
So here I sit snuggly snug snug on my bunk on board the sleeper train bound for Kaifeng City.
 
Everyone around me is either sleeping or trying to sleep but being kept awake by the loudest snorer in the entire world, who is of course right opposite yours truly. I boarded the train around mid day and quickly became friends with a very cute girl from Guangdong who works as an overseas consultant in Beijing and her English was excellent. We sat talking for hours about this and that until ten this evening when the lights went out and I was left sitting as I usually do when I'm on board a train, still wide awake thinking to myself;
 
Who throws a shoe?.....oops, sorry that was Austin Powers who said that.
I actually sit thinking, who the bloody hell goes to sleep at ten in the evening.
 
Anyhow tomorrow morning I will actually get off in Zhengzhou City which is about an hour from Kaifeng. My friend Ying will meet me and the first thing we will do is enjoy a couple of Mc Muffins and have a catch up chat over a Mc ElcheapO Coffee.  
 
Ok, so what has been happening in the past four or five days prior to me boarding this train?
 
The weather has been very much up and down, raining one day and sunny the next kind of thing which makes it rather difficult to enjoy your time when you are travelling. Thankfully though the days it rained it poured so I got a lot of writing done and the days is was sunny it was very warm with a bright blue sky as managed to fit in the last bit of the city I wanted to walk which surprise to me became my favourite part of Guangzhou City. It can be found across the Pearl River and it is known as the Haizhu District which is one of Guangzhou's four ancient districts.
 
The other three are the Liwan, Yuexiu and the Dongshan Districts.  
The Haizhu was once the largest in area and the least dense of the four old districts in Guangzhou.
 
This of course was before the city expanded its size to include districts such as Tianhe to the east and Baiyun to the north.   Haizhu was also the only island district south of the Zhujiang River, so the local people often call it "Henan" ("Honam" in Cantonese, which means "south of the river"). Henan is also the province in northern China where Luo Wei is from. Today, it is no longer the largest district in Guangzhou nor it is the southern most districts. What it is now is actually very costly as it has some of the most expensive real estate in city.   This is due to it being so close to the heart of the city along with the fact that it is not over crowded nor filled with high rise buildings etc, yet. Though it may not be filled with high rises its river front does have some of the tallest and most expensive residential buildings in the city which rival those in Tianhe District.
 
The name Haizhu means "pearl of the sea" in Chinese.
 
I spent most of the sunny daylight hours winding my way around and along Tongfu Zhonglu from Jiangwan Lu to the park that over looks both Shamian Park and the Bai'etan Bar District. Some parts have obviously had money spent on renovating them which make them look more of an New Ancient part of the Ancient District but the rest is still very much stacked on and squashed in..
 
So much so that many of the buildings actually look like they are about to topple over.
 
A good walk for anyone who wants to spend a day over this side of the city would be to begin at The Site of the Former Marshal Palace and simply take a relaxing stroll through the little streets all the way to where the river forks. In many places when you look towards the sky you will see a modern city peering down at you from above just beyond the tiny area you are in.
 
As it looms over you you can almost hear it whispering, soon I will be where you are now!
 
Yes, like in most cities in modern China, many of these ancient blue stoned walkway filled areas are either being demolished, in the process of being marked for demolition or hungrily looming over what was once its neighbors waiting to take the next step in high rise moderisation. I used a small green patch on my map as a destination. It was labeled Haizhuang Park but what I actually found was one of the Guangzhous four great temples called Haizhuang Si which was built during the Southern Han dynasty and named Qianqiu Si. It was renamed Haizhuang Si at the end of the Ming dynasty The temple has well over one thousands years of history and also like most temples most of it had to be rebuilt as much of it was demolished during the cultural revolution.
 
Oh that Cultural Revolution was very cultural wasn't it!
 
In came the writings of Chairman Mao, bounded together in the 'Little Red Book'. Thoughts were thrown around and implemented, posters put up, families were split, romance really sucked, the Red Guards began their destruction, smart people disappeared, special things and places such as art and temples were torched and destroyed. Basically anything 'old' was not allowed eg: old customs, thinking and culture and due to clothing codes and in came the famous Chairman Mao suit!
 
Millions of people died through beatings, executions, suicide and lack or denial of medical care.
Oh those snot nosed little Red Guards, what they did to the country can never be excused or replaced.
 
Anyhow, enough of that it is time for me to shut this thing down and either throw my shoe at the snoring man or use the rest of my battery on my MP3 and hopefully fall asleep with it playing. Today the very south of China, tomorrow back to the north of China.
 
Beers N Noodles toya.....shane
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The soundtrack to this entry was by Jewel
The album was 'Pieces Of You'
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