I’m still not really sure what Chinese people actually do for the Tomb Sweeping Festival. Presumably at least some go sweep the tombs of the deceased, but so few Chinese actually live in their 家乡/jiaxiang (ancestral home) anymore.

A newspaper headline detailing the tariff war with America.

It was completely my fault that I only belatedly discovered I’d have four and a half days off work for the holiday weekend. I’d misread the emails from the English Department, erroneously thinking I’d have to make up classes on the Sunday immediately after Thursday’s national holiday. It wasn’t until the Foreign Studies Department field trip I attended a few days prior that I heard from colleagues the Sunday makeup day was for Friday’s classes, not Thursday’s…and I don’t have classes on Friday = Connor can travel!

My Airbnb host and me eating legit dim sum in Guangzhou. I’d mentioned that I really wanted to go try it, and he and his girlfriend were trying to decide what to do for lunch so we just went together. It was awesome, probably one of the coolest dining experiences I’ve had.

Finding train tickets last minute for a Chinese long weekend is not an experience I’d recommend to others. Most everything was unavailable, and my original plan to spend a few days on the island city of Xiamen (formerly the British colony of Amoy) in the southeastern Fujian province consistently ended in “ALL TICKETS SOLD OUT” error messages. Tickets to Hubei province to see the Three Gorges Dam were gone. Sichuan province, home of spicy food, wasn’t going to work out either. But finally…I scored a bed on one of the numerous daily departures from Shanghai to Guangzhou, conveniently stopping in my Hangzhou along the way.

For dim sum you mark out what you want to order off a big paper menu, though in some places you just pick things off carts doing rounds through the restaurant. I told the Airbnb host’s girlfriend that I’d be willing to eat anything. “That’s a dangerous thing to say in Guangzhou!” she replied. There’s a saying that the Cantonese will eat anything with four legs that’s not a table, anything that flies that’s not an airplane, and anything that swims that’s not a submarine.

Guangzhou has a reputation for being a gritty, industrial (read:polluted beyond belief) city in the far south between Hong Kong and Vietnam. It’s not typically on a tourist’s itinerary, but I was desperate not to spend the holiday weekend staring at the walls of my apartment.

Trying fried chicken feet, with bones and everything still inside.

The Chinese use their phones for absolutely everything imaginable, plus more. The popular messaging app WeChat also doubles as a sales point for the Middle Kingdom’s vast rail network. The one caveat of Chinese train travel is that tickets must be printed in person at the station, which entails queues of anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes. I was lucky in that I’d remembered to bring a book and only had to wait for about 15 minutes. An older man behind me with his friend would verbally attack in a thick unidentifiable accent any and all who dared try to cut in line. 每一样，每一样，都需要排队买票阿！Everyone is equal, line up for your ticket just like everyone else!

Another dim sum photo. One of the big reasons I came to Guangzhou was to eat tons of delicious food. It was a success.

My passport is at the police station being processed for my residence permit, but I’d been given temporary ID papers and travel authorization which got me my tickets without problem. Chinese train stations in major cities are sterile, incomprehensibly massive feats of engineering that lack the charm and character of Europe’s old rail ports, but they efficiently link the vast country’s Han-inhabited areas.

Clear skies along one of Guangzhou’s numerous waterways.

My bed was already made when I boarded in Hangzhou, a bottom bunk in a four berth compartment. The ten hour ride, covering a roughly equivalent distance as New York to Chicago, wasn’t the fastest train available but was quite comfortable. I woke up as we passed the Hong Kong border in Shenzhen, pulling into Guangzhou South Station exactly on time.

A couple walking across the bridge to Shamian Island to take wedding photos, with the Guangzhou skyline in the background.

Green, leafy Shamian Island was where the Europeans used to live during colonial times. Today it’s home to pleasant walks and the American consulate.

As a city of 12 million, Guangzhou has an efficient metro system with announcements in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. Cantonese is a dialect separate from Mandarin, but I had no trouble communicating with most people in the latter. Canton comes from the Portuguese transliteration of the Chinese name for Guangdong, a province of 109 million of which Guangzhou is the capital.

I took the metro to the south side of the city, then hopped on the number 30 bus to an old Cantonese imperial garden. This is the bus stop outside the subway station.

I was the only foreigner at the imperial gardens, which were very pleasant with an extensive bonsai tree collection. Oftentimes Chinese tourists want to take a photo with me, and my requirement is that they send me a copy.

I loaded $20 onto a public transit card, which let me board all trains and buses within the city. Since I can read Chinese and enjoy looking out the window at the city, I usually opt for buses when possible.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to try absolutely everything that I wanted to eat in Guangzhou. But I tried a ton of new foods and didn’t get sick once, the latter being a big success in a place like China.

At this stall, which was constantly crowded, you pick out what grilled meats and vegetables you want. They put it in a bucket and cover it in a spicy sauce.

A woman pours rice milk pudding, a popular Cantonese dessert, into a bowl for a customer holding out her white payment slip. 

Cantonese desserts and pastry shops are popular across China, but in their hometown of Guangzhou they were truly amazing.

Enjoying rice milk pudding in a typical Cantonese dessert cafe.

A chunk of grilled squid tentacle.

Inside a Chinese traditional medicine shopping mall. I later saw dried seahorses in a jar.

Maybe my tolerance for the bizarre has some serious calibration issues, but after a month my life in the People’s Republic of China seems pretty routine. And I really like it here.

Walking along the Bund in downtown Shanghai.

The 15 hour flight from Chicago to Shanghai wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d dreaded. Having stocked my Kindle with plenty of books to keep me occupied, including the newly published Lonely Planet Guide to China, saved my sanity (though I did start to kind of lose it after the 10 hour mark).

Chinese immigration procedures were straightforward and painless, leaving me with my checked suitcase at the Shanghai Pudong Airport train station about 40 minutes after disembarking from the plane. The maglev from the airport to downtown is the fastest commercial train in the world at 270mph (high speed trains generally go about 185mph) and dropped me off at a Shanghai metro station, which I used to travel to my Airbnb.

Downtown Hangzhou. I live in a quiet suburb about a 40 minute subway ride from where I took this photo.

The subways in Shanghai and Hangzhou, my current home, aren’t as crowded or chaotic at rush hour as the equivalent peak times on the Metro de Madrid. Aggressively jostling each day for space on trains and buses operated by the Consorcio Regional de Transportes de Madrid prepared me well for navigating Chinese public transit systems, which are ultra modern and efficient.

There are a lot of restaurants where you just pick from a wide variety of noodles, meats, and vegetables and the cooks turn it into a soup. Or, at some Sichuanese restaurants, you can add insane amounts of spice so that your tear ducts get cleared out. I have a pretty high tolerance for spicy food, but at Sichuanese restaurants it can be a little rough. 

Crispy roast duck, soy rice, cooked bok choy, eggs, tomatoes, and soup. This is from a super popular hole in the wall place across the street from my university, and the not-too-approachable middle aged woman who runs it serves the best food I’ve had in China. Like in most restaurants in China, meals run from $1.50 to $3. Cooking for one’s self isn’t as common in China as in other places.

I gave myself a full day in Shanghai to get adjusted to China and the new time zone, literally on the other side of the world from Ohio, as well as print my train ticket at the station. My job is in Hangzhou, an hour’s bullet train ride from Shanghai Hongqiao, the largest train station in Asia. The building is almost incomprehensibly massive. There’s a train leaving about every 45 seconds with 14,000 passengers boarding or disembarking every hour.

There must be thousands of different passport photos of me in various Chinese government records by this point. Every little part of applying for my residency permit, which will let me enter and leave China without a visa, requires a passport sized photo.

Getting from Shanghai to Hangzhou is pretty easy, a $12 train ticket with departures every five minutes, but in China you can only print your ticket at the station. This took about 30 seconds, I just told the attendant in Mandarin what I wanted and gave her my ticket number with passport. I’d previously bought the ticket online before leaving the US.

At Hangzhou East Station the university had a man with my name on a piece of paper waiting for me. It wasn’t hard to pick me out of the crowd, and the man drove me to my highrise in the suburb of Xiasha. I checked into my apartment, a comparatively spacious studio with shared kitchen and washing machines down the hall, and walked down the street to get a Chinese phone plan.

An interesting ad for donkey meat sandwiches I saw recently. Some of the English translations are pretty bizarre around here.

“Don’t pay attention to those prices, nobody actually pays that,” the attendant at the store told me when she caught me reading the list of prices for phone service. “It’s 18 yuan (~$3) a month for 6GB of data for use inside the province, and then $1.50 for 500MB if you leave to go to Shanghai or some other province.”

“I don’t know my address,” I told her during the registration process.

“No problem, I’ll give you one,” she replied. And within 10 minutes I’d loaded money onto my account and was connected to the China Unicom network.

Eating lunch on a school trip.

A professor from the College of International Studies picked me up to show me around and help me set up an account at the Construction Bank of China, a national bank with ATMs all over the country.

I teach five English conversation classes that are 90 minutes each, and so far I’ve been pleasantly surprised at my students’ English ability. They’re around 20 years old, all freshmen or sophomores, and some have near-native levels of fluency.

There’s a great bike share program in Hangzhou. You scan a code on the bike using your phone, which unlocks the bike. You can pick up and drop off the bikes almost anywhere, and it’s about 16 cents a ride.

My first week I made all the students give a four minute introduction in English, which I’d interrupt with follow up questions to gauge their English level and better help me plan the class. Most of the intros were predictably banal, though there were some notable exceptions. One went on a long diatribe on a Japanese mystery novel she read over break about a police officer who rapes his son’s girlfriend and then is tasked with protecting her from the mob in some kind of witness protection program. I just stared dumbfounded that she’d go into such graphic detail about this on the first day of class. Admittedly, I did have to tell the students that the oft repeated phrase “Over winter break I enjoyed a decadent lifestyle” is not something one would typically hear in English.

I saw this woman on the Hangzhou subway. I liked that the pentagrams had little colored pom poms on them.

One student stayed after class to tell me I had the facial bone structure of a movie star and that she thought I was beautiful. The list of movie stars I’ve been told I resemble is growing increasingly long and bizarre, though locals have admitted to me they have trouble distinguishing between white people. The most common one I’ve got so far is “that guy from 50 Shades of Gray,” which I’m convinced is because apparently the lead actor has a beard. Chinese people don’t have beards, and I’ve been asked a few times if it’s sharp enough to cut skin. I’d be surprised if that movie survived the censors, though I admittedly know very little about it.

Soy braised beef noodle soup from a Hui restaurant by my apartment. The Hui are a Muslim minority, and this is one of my favorite restaurants in Hangzhou.

Went on a hiking trip to a national forest in Zhejiang province (my province) with the International Studies Department.

Being behind the Great Firewall of China has its advantages. It’s kind of nice not hearing about the news each day, which is tightly controlled and determined beforehand by the Party. Politics and 20th century history is something that’s never talked about, but there are some pretty creative ways of talking about something without actually mentioning it.

Also went on a boat ride on that aforementioned trip.