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Published: February 8th 2009
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For more of my photos, or to buy my book, please visit www.nickkembel.com It only seems appropriate to celebrate Chinese New Year by going to...you guessed it, China! So that is exactly what we did. In fact, our main intention was to revisit Shenzhen, the city that I spent half a year living and working in (and Marc another year before me). The crackdown on working visas in the lead up to the Olympics split apart our great group of friends, but this chance to visit offered us a
final opportunity for a little reunion before everybody went their separate ways.
Our journey to China began as it usually does, with a
night spent in mighty Hong Kong, one of the great economic and cultural centers of the world, awaiting our Chinese visas to get processed. Both of us were recovering from fevers, so we had a fairly tame stopover.
We did get a chance to visit
Po Lin Monastery on Lantau Island (the very large and mostly rural island where the Hong Kong International Airport is located), which has the famous
Tian Tan Buddha, an immense 34m seated bronze Buddha. The site was touristy and artificial
to the point where is was difficult to truly appreciate, but I was nonetheless happy to visit this site that I had missed so many times before on visits to Hong Kong because it was inaccessible due to landslides in the region.
Then next day we got our visas and made our way into the the mainland, giving us many nostalgic feelings and bringing back many memories of life in this fascinating country. Unfortunately there was a
bad spell of air quality for the duration of our stay, at some points so smoggy that you could not even read signs across the street, so that made us truly appreciate the clear blue skies and beautiful outdoors we presently enjoy in Taiwan.
We spent a total of 5 days doing nothing but feasting on the exquisite Chinese food that we missed so much, eating at all of our old favorite restaurants, as well as drinking, bowling, playing Frisbee, and socializing with our good friends.
A climax of our stay was the
fireworks display that took place at midnight on Chinese New Year. Fireworks in China are enjoyed in a very different way from west. Instead of a large
central display,
common people purchase their own fireworks, many of them frighteningly large, and set them off throughout the streets of the city and from their apartment roofs and balconies.
For about a week leading up to New Years, and for two weeks after,
the sound of exploding fireworks throughout the city is nearly constant and at all hours of the day and night. The streets are littered with piles upon piles of firework remains, and the smell of gunpowder lingers in the air and clouds of smoke form.
However, the display truly peaked at midnight, with the entire city waking up to shoot fireworks in all directions. We gazed upon this scene from a friend's balcony, watching families turning on their lights and going to their balconies, with
children clutching with fear to giant sticks as they spurt sparks and flames into the air, frequently coming dangerously close to apartment buildings across the way.
After this we wandered the streets for a while, where there was
a true feeling of excitement and pleasure in the air, and we observed one group of men who had a particularly fierce cannon for firing bombs into the air, and
after exploding
the flaming remains would fall to the earth, one time nearly landing on a passing woman; another time smacking into the front of a passing taxi.
After our Shenzhen binge we bid our farewells, then made our way to nearby
Guangzhou (Canton), the capital of Guangdong Province. We met up with an old friend of Marc's and had dinner on
Shamian Island, a unique cluster of colonial and historical buildings on the Pearl River. It was here that opium was docked and funneled into China, among other historical events of significant importance.
We enjoyed getting a feel for this city that was so close to where we used to live but we had never checked out previously. There was a more 'Chinese' feel to it, at least compared to modern Shenzhen, a fabricated 'Special Economic Zone' that many argue lacks history and character.
Throughout our stay in China we got a good dose of sights that define what I loved so much about China: An old man throwing garbage out the open door of the MRT onto the platform, crowds of people like you can't imagine, old Chinese women pushing you out of the way
to get onto a bus; essentially all those things that add
immense character to this overpopulated and polluted nation, things that are sometimes lacking in the ultra modern, polite and organized country that I now live in.
For more of my photos, or to buy my book, please visit www.nickkembel.com
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neil Haggard
non-member comment
Great stories
Hey Nick - finally got some time to check out your New year celebrations. Looks like a great time. You have a wonderful life full of adventure. I only hope I have half the fun you do in your travels. All the best in 2009. Keep in touch. Neil