Guangzhou Day 4

11th March, 2018 I woke up at 8:30AM to get an early start with my breakfast and we depart to the Guangdong Museum at 10:00AM.

We went to Mucha and the Other: Treasures of Art Nouveau. I personally would love to stare into paintings to see the details. I enjoyed the paintings by the Czech painter because I can imagine his process painting each and every single paintings I saw that day. Furthermore, some paintings reminded me of the Greek/Roman art. On top of that, I enjoyed staring at the religious sculptures displayed in the exhibition as well. At the end of Mucha exhibition, we left for lunch because honestly, we did not know that there were other exhibitions except for Mucha and the porcelain but we did not get to view the porcelains either.

At 2:00PM we left to REDTORY. Redtory has a lot of Hipster Cafes, and the area made me feel very peaceful.

In Redtory, I get to observe style tribes of the people there, people were definitely following Korean Fashion, and all white flowy dress or skirt as well as a lot of Streetwear. Furthermore, before leaving, I had to go to the restroom but we did not have any idea of where the restrooms were, therefore, I had to speak Mandarin Chinese, a language that I have learnt 3 times in my life, during kindergarten, middle school and high school however still bad at it. Nonetheless, during this trip I get to brush up on my Mandarin speaking skills which I am very happy about. After Redtory, a wholesale market is our next stop of the day and back to walking to the train station but overall Redtory was a good place for youngsters, or hipsters to gather with friends.

Then we left REDTORY to go to a wholesale market is located in Shangxiajiu Pedestrian Market which is nearby the MRT station called Changshou Lou. In this street, there were a lot of street food and faux products that mimics international brands like Nike, Vans, and many more.

The only thing we bought at the wholesale market was food, definitely plenty of good street food. We got dismissed as soon as we reached the market area and we got to have a mini adventure around the wholesale market area looking at shoes, bags and clothes while eating as well. In the end, we went back to the MRT station passing by a mall and each of us bought a slipper as our feet was hurting then off we go to the train. However, when we were in the train, a guy got stuck in between the train doors while we were in shock, the local people stared and nobody helped him as he tries his best to get into the train but fortunately for him, he managed. When my friends and I reached the hotel area, we went to have our dinner at a Chinese restaurant that only serves Mala. Mala is a spicy chili oil soup that we get to choose any meat or vegetable to go together with the soup. Last but not least, today we get to experience and see a lot of things in the different places we went.

To conclude, I loved the food here, the art scene, architecture but in my opinion, buying brands like Nike, Adidas, Vans is risky when you are in China, everything could look the same even the same price but its fake. For example; look at the picture above on the left (which I took), the shoes are called WANIKE (not Nike) but its 549 Yuan! which is about MYR 343 (SGD 115) to me this is absolutely absurd!

- Stephanie Steven