Hi Ka Pai here. This morning I was woken up bright and early by Alan’s phone alarm going off. Mary jumps out of bed and has a shower followed by Alan. Suddenly after they are both dressed and ready to go to breakfast, Mary looks at her watch and realises that it is actually 2.30am not 6.30am. She reset the watches and thought she had reset the cellphone, but hadn’t. So back to bed after resetting the alarm and thankfully we all went back to sleep.
Up again at 6.30 and off to Mc Donald’s for breakfast as it was close quick and cheap and then back to the hotel to wait for the arrival of the tour guide. A very dapper little Chinese man arrives and introduces himself with “I am Sam” S-A-M. To which Mary and Alan muttered Sam I am. (Would you, could you tell me what they meant by that?)
“Sam I am” proved to be very amusing throughout the day. He took his role as tour guide very seriously and instructed Mary and Alan zealously about every move. He walked at an incredibly fast pace and although there were only five in the group all were struggling to keep up at times.
He took them to the train station where he bought the tickets for the train that took them to the border of China to a place called Shenzhen City. There they met up with Linda the main tour guide for the day. Linda is one of the ‘one child only policy” generation. She speaks exceptionally good English and has been to college to train in English and Tourism. This city has only been developed in the last 30 years and is now home for 14 million people.
The first stop was at the Dafeng oil painting village. This is where they produce the fakes of all the great masters. Some of the paintings are originals, but most are very clever fakes all done using photography and oils. There are more than 2000 artists working at the local galleries and it is the wholesale production centre for massed produced paintings.
From there they went to see some genuine Terra Cotta Warriors on display and some beautiful work done in Jade. As usual though, high pressure selling followed the viewing, but they resisted. The tea drinking ceremony was enjoyable and they bought some tea.
Included in the tour was a sumptuous if not somewhat over the top Chinese Banquet in an hotel. The last two hours were spent in the 800 store Lo Wu shopping mall full of “Genuine Fakes”. Here are the real thing, copied with exactly the same materials for a fraction of the price. The main trade is in watches and handbags. The whole shopping experience is ruined by the overpowering touts jumping out on the European tourists. There are just far too many traders all selling the same stuff competing for the tourist dollar. You literally can’t look at a thing without being pounced on. The Australian family who had joined the tour found it much the same and by 3.45 everyone had all given up and gone back to the meeting point. There seems to have been some things squashed down the bag on top of me, but Mary is keeping quiet about this.
The whole experience of crossing the border and going through customs had proved interesting. On the desk in front of the customs officers in China were three smiley faced electronic buttons. People were asked to press the happy green smiley if you thought the service was excellent, the orange straight faced smiley if it was satisfactory and the red sad faced smiley if they were dissatisfied. The tour guide warned the big people not to press red unless they wanted an extended stay in China. He was insistent that they pressed the green button although we noticed that most people ignored it. A 45min train trip back to the hotel and we are all resting.
Mary seems to think the internet is available in this room so hopefully she will get this up online soon.
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