China here we come

Hello from Shenzhen, China. It is roasting!

We left Hong Kong on the 11th anniversary of its handover to the mainland. Bit of a shame to miss the celebrations and protests but time is marching on.

Once a small fishing village, this town which is China's first Special Economic Zone, is essentially just a sprawling mass of concrete and road but it's good for getting to other parts of China and seems to have a fair amount going on aside from business and real-estate, ie. it's not completely soulless. I reminds me of Dubai with its blue skies, wide roads, massive hotel complexes, office blocks and plush shopping plazas, all of which have been built within the last twenty years.

Arriving here this afternoon, we suddenly realised how easy we had it in South East Asia where English is spoken and written pretty much everywhere. Ric especially fears the language barrier and hates asking for help, whereas I don't mind coming across as an ignorant mono-lingual Westerner. So far we've found the Chinese incredibly helpful. Mind you, we only arrived a few hours ago and my dear friend (who I hadn't seen since I did my MA at Goldsmiths) has been looking after us. She even left work for a while to collect us from the station and take us to the hotel she had booked! It's something of a relief to have a friend around while we find our feet in this big place.

We've just returned from a great vegetarian meal (after three years she remembered that I didn't eat meat!)

There are some scary if hysterically funny menus here. For lunch just now we could have selected any one of the following dishes:

Millions of Intestinal Bamboo Huang
The head Chopped Steamed
Papaya Questioned
The Soup Resembles More Extreme Geese Wong
Plate dropping the Yellow Ear Lily Explodes the Spiral Piece

It was a tough choice.

Another observation - the Chinese don't seem to know how to queue. Was nearly trampled by a stampede of kids and their parents at the station earlier. Manners??!!