welcome to china: shenzhen

i took the metro to one of the two points to cross into mainland china by metro: lo wu. loads of people on a saturday so a bit of a wait to get through hong kong immigration. then the walk to the chinese side. entry form duly completed and presented with passport to the chinese clerk at immigration, and i’m in china. first thing i do is buy a sim card. the shenzhen metro system is right by the exit from the subterranean immigration checkpoints.

it’s a long ride to get to the opposite side of shenzhen where my couchsurfing host, van, is living. the directions she gave me by email prove to be good and i find her place, a massive tower block estate called the peninsular – it was popular with the ex-pat community in shenzhen, of which van was one, hailing as she was from the philippines. luckily, i meet her at the entrance door to her block, and she leads me up to her flat. i’m to share the living room couches with her ‘weekend couchsurfer’ kim. it was a nice two day stay. i desperately needed to get my washing done! van’s two dogs were a bit of a handful, and me and kim took a turn to walk them around the peninsular block one time.

kim turned out to be a dab hand at cooking and rustled up some quick and easy meals for us. he was a traveller too and second generation immigrant from china to australia. he had done his ‘roots trip’ and found out some interesting stuff about his family and ancestors at the ancestral village in rural china. he was unconventional and direct in his opinions, but had a warm centre beneath the rough exterior.  he and van took me to the train station to help get a ticket to jinan. they also invited me for a session at the peninsular swimming pool, a welcome respite from the heat and humidity. lots of ex-pats there too, and kim was complaining that some of the chinese girls just hung out with the foreigners because they had money. well, maybe some of these balding, middle-aged, overweight and pot-bellied might have had some other endearing characteristic that could have attracted the young pretty chinese girls?

van owned a general convenience store in the estate which did a good business selling to the ex-pat community. she had been in china for a few years now, and her chinese was quite good. i thanked her for her hospitality and left to get the bus to near the train station.

i had been in china before, in beijing for a week, but it still took me by surprise. i hadn’t seen much of shenzhen but i already got the feeling of the tremendous amount of construction and labour that was being utilized to build the new china. there were lots of tower blocks in construction, with cranes jutting the skyline everywhere. it felt intimidating, and with the massive language barrier, i was not feeling so comfortable. it wasn’t really a culture shock, just a general unease at the immenseness of it all. still, it was early days.