Shenzhen/Guangzhou

Shenzhen

A ride on the train from Mong Kok, and shortly later I was in the PRC. Quickly through customs, I caught the metro to an electronics shopping mall to buy a laptop. It was a bit hard to find, but I got there in the end. It is quite impressive, electronic components of almost imaginable variety on sale by a variety of vendors. Hungry, tired, and a little hung over, I struggled, and eventually saw a laptop that looked adequate. I am pretty sure all the other ones were one floor up, but I was beyond caring. The Sony Vaio knockoff booted my Ubuntu memory stick, and I paid 1280 yuan.

Back to the metro, then on to Guangzhou.

Guangzhou

What a shithole. I also got duped by some 'taxi bookers', who charged me about 4 times that actual cost of a taxi for a private car. They also told me that the metro would involve about 3 changes to get where I wanted. Lies. It was one line all the way! However I was tired, hungry, and grumpy, so just got into the car (after spending 10 minutes explaining where I wanted to go). The trip took about 30 minutes, and the fucker of a driver whinged at the end that he wanted more money because it was so far away. I bluntly said no and walked off.

Checked in, installed Ubuntu on the laptop only to find out that the power management does not work, so the battery only lasts 1 hour, and the machine hangs instead of shutting down. A new custom kernel should fix this, but pretty hard to do with the slow internet connectivity.

My first attempt to order food in the PRC ended with me accidentally ordered enough Mapo Doufu for a family of eight. Very tasty.

The city itself is incredibly polluted, and the haze/smog is visible within 10 metres. The river side is nice enough, but spoiled by the aforementioned pollution. Shamian Island is very pretty.

I also got a one hour chinese massage for my back and shoulders. This ended with me having a very sore neck for the next couple of days, but all the knots in my back were worked out.