Blogs from Shenzhen, Guangdong, China, Asia - page 4

Another day, another hike. I have to get them in before the weather gets too hot and humid and I retreat to curl up under my air con for the summer. Since it was a holiday, I thought the trails might be busy. I headed from the subway up to the park entrance. I was surprised that there wasn't too many people around. The guard actually checked to see that my health code was green, which I'd never had done there before. They must be being stricter because it is a holiday. The walk up the road to the start of the trails was quite busy, but not too bad. Just before reaching the trails, I popped into my favourite public toilets in the whole of China, still spotless. I wish everywhere was like this. There ... read more

Shenzhen Bay Park has its own metro station so is very easy to get to. I had been in the area before, but since the weather that day had been pretty bad, I'd skipped having a look around the park. Since the weather was better today, I decided to stretch my legs with a nice walk in the park. When I came out of the metro station it was quite busy with people having a look at the view and deciding where they wanted to go. The park stretches for 13 kilometres, I though it was 16km, and is a popular spot for walking and cycling. There was some stuff to the north, but since that wouldn't have been much of a walk and I didn't want to retrace my steps. I headed south. I had ... read more

From Seaworld Station exit B, it was a short walk about 5-10 minutes to the entrance to Nanshan Park. I passed a few nice looking apartment blocks. The walk to the start of the trail wasn't too bad, as it was on a nice gently sloping paved road. There were some pretty trees lining the walk with pretty red flowers. It was nice to look at those and made up for the fact there was no view of the surrounding area. I think I must have walked along the path for about ten to fifteen minutes before I reached Longevity Culture Square. This was a nice little square with some kind of rock feature/waterfall that was missing the water and plenty of exercise equipment in the shade. The trail, the No. 1 Climbing Path, started here. ... read more

Hey guys, So after Macau and Hong Kong and Immigration, we were pretty wrecked yesterday, so we just stayed in bed till lunchtime, then had lunch, then had dinner, then went back to bed, so that explains the absence of a blog. Today was vaguely more interesting though, although I think we slept for the same amount of time...We were hoping to go to a tea market to check it out today so we were taken to one a couple of blocks from where we are staying, we made it to the second floor, I'm not sure if it went any higher but it's, as you can probably imagine, filled with tea. That's one thing I really love about China, everything is sold in clumps, like when we went to Dafen the other day, all the ... read more

This week marks China’s National Week, a week long celebration of The Republic of China. Our first year here, so why not embrace all that this beautiful country has to offer? Monday was the official start of the holiday week, very similar to the USA’s Labor Day. Most businesses and all government offices were closed. Our day started rather lazy American-ish. We woke around 10am, had a very American breakfast (egg white omelette and fruit) and went to the gym. Thinking we were much closer, we thought we would go to Huaxing Temple. After a lot of research, it was determined that we would go another day. Instead, we hit another local spot / not-so tourist tourist trap: The Dafen Oil Painting Village ————— After wandering around the metro of Dafen, ignoring the multiple KFCs, McDonalds, ... read more