But last year, I decided to brave Everest Base Camp (Tibet) with my friends and to reach there, we had to take train from Chengdu. That marks my virgin trip to China and I can assure you that every single story I've heard are true! Hahaha.
But this is not a blog abt Chengdu, nor Tibet. If you know me, you have probably already seen many many photo (and I mean MANY since the whole group took >10K photo between us). This is sharing about my most recent trip to Guangzhou, the Land of Opportunities!
In contrary to Chengdu, Guangzhou seems a tad more industrial. Indeed, I later found that Guangzhou is broadly splitted into 2 areas - Financial sector and the Wholesale sector, and we were at the latter. During our short 4D4N trip, we experienced many interesting things!
1) Wholesale Markets - When we talk abt wholesale market for clothing, Platinum Mall in BKK or Wu Fen Pu in Taiwan would probably come to mind first. Massive number of shops, but relatively civilized. In China, no such thing!! The moment we stepped into wholesale market like Xin Zhong Guo or Sha He, it's like a war!!!!! Can you imagine that in a building, there are 10-20 storeys of clothing stores and each floor is packed full of people? Since most of the people are locals getting stock for their shops, they will seriously buy in BULK and the deliverymen will bulldoze their way through. "Sorry" and "Excuse Me" don't exist! If you are not careful, you may just fall and be stepped on by all these people.
2) Experience with the Locals - Although the people are pretty scary, I must say I admire their drive and how focused they are! In Singapore, we complain if we have to work on weekends. To them, it is a norm to work 7 days a week (with 3 days off per mnth). In addition, I must say Chinese are really generous when hosting guests. During this trip, we were hosted by Yusen's dad's friend, 王总, who was kind enough to arrange for people to bring us around and treated us to yummy meals. Besides that, he and his partners graciously shared their experience working in China.
All in all, it was an eye-opening experience and it is a place I would visit again soon. Winkz...Below is a photo Rich & moi took at 上下九路....
