Field trip weekend, part I

The first panda I've ever seen!

Good morning from Shanghai! Both Facebook and Blogger are blocked in the mainland China, but yesterday evening I was nerd enough to be able to access them both. For Facebook I used a 15-minute long trial version of Securitales and to Blogger I just clicked myself through Gmail - too easy! 

Later today I'll do some sightseeing, but now I'll tell a little about my previous excursion to the mainland; the field trip weekend to Guangzhou & Shenzhen. I'm taking a class called Attractions Management, and as a part of the course we have to make a group work in which we create a new product for one attraction in the Southern mainland. We visited a Safari Park and an International Circus in Guangzhou, and an amusement park in Shenzhen.

We left on a Saturday morning at 8:15 from PolyU with a private bus towards the North. We had a tour guide who only spoke Cantonese, since "it would've been so expensive to hire an English-speaking tour guide." So what often happened is that the tour guide spoke for like half an hour to the microphone, and when me and Kathi asked from the others what did she just say, they translated it somewhat like "Bring your valuables with you" and nothing else. I guess rest of the half an hour long talk wasn't that important then...

As soon as we crossed the border between Hong Kong and the mainland, the scenery changed completely. Felt like during our 3-hour ride to Guangzhou we didn't see anything else but white / grey apartment buildings through a thick smog. The air in Hong Kong can be very bad to breathe, but it was amazing how big the difference was on the mainland and how much worse the air was because of all the pollution. Shenzhen and its surroundings are very industrial and it is easy to see the consequences.

Oh yeah, the chicken in the picture was a part of our first meal in China. It is a traditional way to eat an animal: first they cook it as a whole, then bring it to the table for the people to see, and after everyone has taken enough pictures, they take it to the backstage again and cut it into smaller pieces, and then bring the plate to the table (and leave the head of the animal on the plate for everyone to see). At least people in China have much more natural relationship with their food, seems like in Western countries people don't even think that the meat they're eating is actually originated from a living animal :P

The first attraction we visited was a Zoo / Safari in Guangzhou. It was by far the best zoo I've been to, we saw pandas and koalas and giraffes and elephants and zebras and all, and many of the animals were running relatively free in a wide area, which was nice to see. But just before we left the park, we went to see a White Tiger Show, and it was not nice at all. The tigers seemed to be drugged and apathetic; they got whipped for nothing and some of them were bleeding since they had been hit so many times. Probably in Europe this kind of show would've been banned since day 1, but in here the audience seemed to really like it...

I have to give some credit to China for the amusement park / theme park scene. Seriously, nobody else does it like China. You think you've seen it all, but there's always more weird and enormous stuff coming up... The word I've been searching for to describe all this craziness is: megalomania.