He was sitting on a bench near a large pond in a very pleasant park in Guangzhou. He had a scroll looking piece of paper and was practicing his English, although the phrase he was practicing wasn’t very friendly.
As I got closer he looked up at me and very carefully said, “Hello.”
“Hello” I responded.
“Good morning,” he said. It was 12:30 in the afternoon, but I didn’t argue.
“Good morning,” I responded.
“Wel – welcm to China.” I didn’t quite understand and looked at him a little quizzically. He tried again.
With a little effort, “Welcome to, China.” And he smiled.
“Thank you,” I said, smiling in kind, “I appreciate that.”
“Goodbye,” he waved.
“Goodbye.”
And so I continued down the path, with a bag slung over each shoulder, looking about as much a tourist as a person can look. I didn’t have my camera out, though, the battery on it was dead. I must have left it on or something.
It is pretty common for people to remark about how friendly everyone was when they go on vacation. I imagine this is because people act differently while they are on vacation. They are open and happy and actually engage other people and this is going to lead to finding out that people, in general, are very nice.
After having said that, I was amazed by how incredibly nice people were in China.
A stranger on the subway pointed out my untied shoelace with a smile.
Another helped me figure out where I was going while I looked at the subway map.
The old man at the pond was genuinely pleasant.
An older couple at the Orchid Garden and I had a brief silent conversation about some water lilies by pointing and smiling.
I enjoyed my casual walk through Guangzhou, but I had my bags on my shoulders. The hotel wouldn’t hold any valuable electronics for me outside of my room. My legs were already tired and although my knee was doing much better, a fact I attribute to better shoes and walking on something other than polished concrete, I didn’t have much desire to keep walking all day.
Luckily, I had planned ahead for this and told the hotel I would return at 2:00 pm to pick up my remaining bag and take a taxi to the airport.
I arrived back to the hotel about an hour early, which was nice. I relaxed in the lobby bar, had a beer, used up the rest of my Chinese cell phone minutes by calling a friend, and related the events of the trade show to my boss.
The battery on my computer died moments before the bell boy came to tell me my Taxi had arrived.
All of this ended up getting me to the airport hours before I needed to be there. My flight left at 9 pm and I got to the airport at 2:45. The check-in counter for my flight didn’t even open until 5 pm.
The flight itself was uneventful, although it felt really weird to be flying home to Thailand. I had really enjoyed China, but it would be nice to go to a place where I had at least a rudimentary understanding of the language and culture.
I had parked my car in the long term parking lot, which is an extremely common thing to do in America, but is about as unusual as it gets here in Thailand, apparently. There were no shortage of Long Term lots (up to H, I think), but all of them were closed except for A, and A only had 40 or 50 cars in it. Still, I had been able to park my car and get on a bus that took me to the airport.
Getting back wasn’t so easy. Despite carefully memorizing which bus I needed to take and where it stopped, it went in a complete loop without going back to the right parking lot. I was able to at least see the parking lot, but that was while we were on a U-turn overpass going over it.
Frustrated and having wasted an hour on that pointless bus ride, I decided to screw it all and take a taxi. I was able to communicate “long term parking lot,” but the taxi assistants had absolutely no idea where I was trying to go. They wrote it down anyway and directed me to a taxi, where I just had to hope it would get me near to where I wanted to go.
Despite having a good spacial sense of where this place was, the maze of freeways and roadways at 12:30 in the morning kept turning me around, and I wasn’t able to be sure if I was even going to the right place.
Eventually the taxi driver got to a place that I had recognized from the bus trip, and I was able to point my way to my car. My fears that the lot would be closed and I wouldn’t be able to get out, that my car would be stolen, or that it would have been broken into were all totally unfounded.
I finally made it home, as I said, at 2:30 last night.
The cost savings of parking my car at the airport (about $45 less than hiring a driver for the 2 way trip, less on a trip longer than 2 days) really isn’t worth the headache of trying to get to the damned parking lot.