Loving The Guangzhou's People's Park!

AM in Guangzhou's People's Park, PM getting lost in Shenzhen 



I’m usually a morning person. In average, I’d get up at 6 AM, even when I hit the bed at 2 AM. But in this trip, waking up at 8 AM is my average. However, for our last morning in Guangzhou, we made ourselves wake up earlier, so that we could check out the people’s activities in the People’s Park before leaving for Shenzhen. And so we left the hotel at 8ish AM, without taking a shower first.




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People’s Park

Again, we took the Metro to the Gongyuanqian station and made an exit at the sign that directed to People’s Park. We’re lucky that the signage is also in English.

It's the year of the Tiger!

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As described by Uncle Leo previously, this park is always filled mostly with elders doing all sorts of activities, especially in the morning. It’s a huge park. In one spot there’s a group of elders singing and playing music while some others sit and watch, in other spots there are groups doing aerobics, ballroom dance, playing badminton, tai chi, and playing cards. Some were just sitting around, watching people go by, or catching on with the world through the newspapers.

The aerobic bunch

Tai chi around a statue

Bridge? Poker? Who knows!

"Can I please play again? I promise I won't cheat this time.."
hollered the man on the bench

Excercise your throats.. by singing along..!

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I liked the atmosphere there. It felt.. healthy. And I couldn’t stand just sitting and watching people doing all sorts of thing, so I joined a tai chi group – without permission, cos I probably didn’t have to and I’d bet they wouldn’t understand me anyways. The old ladies didn’t seem to mind that I joined them, copying their moves like an amateur would.

The tai chi masters

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Sometimes I could see some of them would look at me funny and said some stuff to each other in Chinese with a little giggle. Tee hee. I didn’t mind. I truly enjoyed doing the tai chi moves to the Chinese music played in their boom box. And after a while, Renny joined as well.

Healthy activities at Guangzhou's People's Park

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Unplanned Shopping

I would love to stay at the park for a little longer, but we had to limit our fun there because check out time is at noon. So we headed back to the Metro. On our way there, a KFC counter was calling us to get in and have breakfast there.

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Ordering food was quite funny because the cashier giggled in our miscommunication due to her lack of English skill and our lack of Chinese skill. I liked it that she and the other staff just laughed about it instead of getting angry like other non-English-speaking Chinese would. Thank you, guys :)

--> Most of the shops in that underground floor – the underground station is surrounded by commercial shops and food / beverage counters – were still closed, including this Disney store which displayed a very interesting pair of red shoes. So we took our time in KFC until the shops are open. And what did we get? Renny, a pair of Mickey-branded shoes, and me, pairs of the same brand. And I had to borrow Renny’s RMB because I couldn’t find any money changer nearby. Yaaayy, new shoes..!! ^_^

To Shenzhen We Went

Good thing that we had packed our bags the night before because we kinda got carried away when shopping underground (ooh, that sounds scandalous!), that we arrived at only 5 minutes to 12 at the hotel. We checked out as soon as we got our bags from the room. There were quite a lot of people in the check out queue, and it wasn’t even in the weekend.

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Our train to Shenzhen departed at around 1 PM and I forgot how much the ticket cost, The train ride was only about 1 hour long to Shenzhen Railway Station in Luohu, which is apparently in the centre of the city.

The Long and Winding Road to City Inn Baoan, Shenzhen

When trying to find the hotel with the taxi driver, I thought that we should’ve done more thorough research on the location of everything in the city. Why? Because this hotel turned out to be soooooooooooo far away from the train station. It cost us about RMB 100 because of the distance and the getting lost. Haha. We showed the Chinese address to the driver and we even got information from Tourist Information in the train station. (She advised 2 options: take the bus or taxi, but we were too tired to take the bus.. and just plain lazy.)

We were afraid that we got ripped off by the taxi driver, pretending not knowing where the hotel located, so that the meter cost got too expensive. But if he was ripping us off, he must had been an Oscar winner for the best actor. He did look confused, plus the language barrier with us, and for several times he had to stop and asked people on the street – Renny went asking for direction as well – about how to get to the darning hotel.

We finally found the hotel, it took us about an hour in total from Louhu. At this point, we were regretting our decision of booking this faraway hotel, we should’ve found somethint in the Louhu area.. (or another branch of City Inn which is exactly across the Window of the World as we found out later on) ^$%&*$R#@!@&&*!! Oh well, we just had to make the best out of what we got, right? Right! smile!!!

Our room in the faraway hotel