We stayed a week in Hangzhou, then flew on to Guangzhou in Guangdong province in the far south of China for my third and final class this visit. The class was actually held in Qingyuan, a green sub-tropical city 50 km to the north, just above the Pearl River Delta that drains into the South China Sea. Much of the taxi service in Qingyuan is provided by men on motorbikes, so we soon found ourselves criss-crossing the city centre as pillion passengers on bikes weaving adeptly through the traffic, delivering us to Cantonese restaurants much more quickly than would otherwise have been possible. After class one day we visited the “Golden Phoenix”, the new Qingyuan People’s Hospital. It was a huge, modern complex with the latest equipment – the Outpatient Department alone occupied a floor area of five hectares! Another evening the class chartered a multi-deck sightseeing boat to take us all down the Bei Jiang (“North River”) – the anchor was dropped midstream at sunset and we enjoyed a dinner of fish, eel, shrimps, chicken and vegetables, all caught or grown within a stone’s throw of here. At one point we passed under a high, narrow concrete bridge as the 350 km per hour fast train to Wuhan streaked overhead.
While I was teaching in Qingyuan, Lee Tuan took a train to Hong Kong for the weekend to visit her cousin and new baby, and other relatives who had flown in from Singapore for the baby’s one month old “Mua Guek” celebration. We met again at the Guangzhou International Airport on Monday morning, my work now completed, and from there we flew north to Shanghai to take a few days’ rest.
Shanghai was at its best. The sky was unusually blue and bright and the air perfect for walking. Since our previous visit to this most vibrant of Chinese cities, the subway system has been extended to both the Pudong International and Hongqiao Airports. From the latter, where we arrived from Guangzhou, it was only a short 30 minute ride on Subway Line 2 to the West Nanjing Road stop in the city centre, close to the JC Mandarin Hotel where we checked in for a few days. At night we walked along the recently redeveloped Bund, the riverside precinct along the Huangpu River and location of the 2010 Shanghai International Expo. It’s a great place for an after-dark stroll – the Pudong skyscrapers sparkling along the river’s eastern bank, the old restored British colonial-era buildings glowing on the west.
