Going South
I’m just back from a trip to Southern China, including my first visits to Zhuhai, Shenzhen, Macao. The picture shows my colleague, Zhang Houcan, in front of the symbol of Zhuhai, the “fisher girl statue.”
I’ve long been curious to see this part of China, because it is certainly the most economically vibrant and a place that’s developing in interesting ways. Not the least of which is the proximal cause of the visit. There is a campus of Beijing Normal University there, which is just like the one in Beijing except for the palm trees, the beautiful campus about 8 times the size of the main one, and a tradition that goes back several months vs. more than 100 years. The “International school of education” opened in September (and I believe I was the first international person to give a lecture there). I’ll describe the school more tomorrow.
The flight down was uneventful, although airline food in China is really bad, and isn’t even Chinese food. There were pieces of strange meat, thousand-year-old pound cake, and other stuff. All the airports have temperature scanning systems in place, although no one stops to get their temperature read. There were a few SARS posters in the Beijing airport, but otherwise there really wasn’t any sign of the SARS control effort that was so big last Spring.
We flew into Shenzhen airport and were met by a car and driver from the university, who drove us on a really nice road down to Zhuhai. We checked into the guesthouse, which was the most modern-looking and well-appointed hotel room I’ve stayed in in China. Then we went out to dinner with various people from the school of education to a big Guangdong restaurant that featured various seafood items cooked in traditional Chinese ways (such as tieban (iron plate) oysters instead of beef). The only non-seafood item was a stew of dog meat. Because of all the Korean restaurants in Beijing, dog is very common there, and my Chinese so-called friends delight in confronting me with dog as a food item. The Korean dog dishes tend to be really salty, which this was not. For the first, but not the last time this trip, I heard the joke about how Guangdong people eat everything that flies except airplanes and everything with legs except tables and everything under the sea except for submarines. The fish and seafood weren’t cooked quite as thoroughly as I might prefer in an unfamiliar area, but they were very tasty.