July 28
- Kate Ross
- Aug 3, 2019
- 5 min read
Today was my first day in China, and Sol had planned so much for us to do during my short visit.
Our first stop of the day was Shunfengshan Park. Sol basically described it as being extremely larger than Central Park, and boy was she right. Due to the sheer size of this park, the best mode of transportation was by bike. Something that I quickly realized in China was the quantity of public bikes available to people. After two months in Taipei I thought that they had a lot of YouBikes (their public bikes), but China absolutely had more. Once Sol figured out the bike situation for both of us and how to rent them, we were on our way.
Our first stop of our bike ride through the park was a giant Chinese gate structure which is called a 牌坊 - páifāng. Apparently this particular gate is called China's No. 1 Paifang due to its massive size of 37.6m high x 88m wide. For a citizen of America who doesn't think in meters, let's just say it was GIANT. I thought that the 牌坊 at the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial was huge (think back to the creepy Winnie the Pooh picture), but this one in Foshan is enormously more large.
If you can tell in these pictures the gate had several large bridges in front of it. It wasn't until Sol told me, "Kate, let's go bike up over the bridges" that I realized how long it has been since I've been on a bike. It might have been the "It's been a long time since I've been on a bike" or just "the bridges were huge" I'm going to choose to believe the latter, but I'm going to leave it and say this 牌坊 was GINORMOUS.
As we were biking through the rest of the park it simply felt endless. There were orange juice squeezing machines, temples, people practicing tai-chi, art installations and so much more. The best part was that we took the short path around the park. There was an entire mountain with even more endless places to go and visit. When Sol told me that this park was larger than Central Park all I could think was "Scuze me? Central Park is HUGE. How can anything be larger than Central Park?" Well Shunfengshan Park is definitely larger than the iconic central park.
One of the art installations in particular reminded me of the new addition to the New York City architectural wonders: Hudson Yard's Vessel. Granted, this art instillation was a fraction of the size of the one in NY. But I could definitely see some similarities.
Do at least tell me that I'm not just imagining things. You can also see the similarities. Right?
While at this particular art installation I also had the opportunity to get a glimpse into Sol's fear of heights. Standing at the top of this instillation you were probably only about one story off of the group. I do understand how it could be scary and freighting to someone uncomfortable with heights as the structure was slightly wobbly. However, tomorrow we had plans to go visit the Canton Tower. To say the least, that activity would be interesting for everyone involved in that expedition.
Since biking was my primary mode of transportation in this park I didn't stop to take pictures of everything since we were also on a bit of a time crunch. I am definitely sad about it because as I was biking I saw some pretty memorable things (Chinese police officers in a clump of Segways traveling together, almost as if they were in the mafia or something). But I did get some amazing panoramic views!
One last thing about this park (picture will follow the panoramas) who doesn't love a good English mis-translated sign???
After a solid two hours in the park we were on to Location Number TWO, I'm not entirely sure where lunch was, but it was at a mall inside of a hotel. Once we finally got ourselves to the correct location at the mall it was a matter of finding the place inside of the hotel. Needless to say, Sol isn't the best at navigating. We somehow managed to find ourselves in the cleaning service stair area in order to go to the fourth floor as we somehow managed to find ourselves on the tenth floor. I mean, what would traveling be without some accidental navigation errors?
When we finally got to the correct floor in the hotel I was quickly introduced to some more of Sol's extended family. This was her uncle's family that lives in the nearby area. I had dim-sum with Sol, her mom and grandma, along with her uncle, aunt, and two kids. My very limited experience with dim-sum has been in Phoenix with primarily pork and shellfish heavy food items. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of that here in Asia. But Sol's family made a special effort to order stuff that I could eat (and I greatly appreciated it). Our table ended it up having more exotic meat like cow liver and chicken feet to Durian sweet rolls and flower cream cake, and every other dim-sum type food in between. It was quite delicious and absolutely filling.
My favorite picturesque part of lunch was watching Sol eat the head of a sweet rabbit coconut concoction.
Now half-way done with the day, we were on to our next stop -- the Foshan Ancestral Temple. Honestly I'm not entirely sure what the Foshan Ancestral Temple was all about. During my time in China, I quickly realized that Sol honestly had no idea what places we were going to and anything about them. However, that's perfectly fine.
Inside the Ancestral Temple were two exhibits about martial arts masters Huang Feihong and Yip Man. Mostly these were museums were the type with pictures and words about the pictures. I found it particularly funny that the portrait of Huang Feihong and the portrait of Huang Feihong's son looked identical to one another. I mean can you even spot the difference?
While at the Ancestral temple we were able to see a other interesting sights, a temple, a Cantonese Opera performance, some weapons on display and roughly all of the other things that you'd find in an Ancestral Temple.
The last thing at the Foshan Ancestral temple was viewing the famous Lion Dance. There I felt as if everyone was there. There were simply SOOOOO many people. In order to see what was happening Sol, her cousin, and I ended up standing on a riased platform in between two tents filled with people. It was less than a stellar place for amazing pictures. I definitley got mad at some people who were standing in my way, but that's okay. I somehow still miraculously managed to come out with some pretty interesting photos.
The Lion Dance was unbelievable. Actually, I think its mainly the acrobatics that always intrigue me, but nevertheless this was an absolutely wonderful activity that I am very glad I was able to witness.
My last and final stop of the day was dinner at Foshan Lingnan World. This was essentially a large mall area with lots of restaurants and shops and plenty of options of places to go. We eventually decided to eat dinner at a place with XiaoLongBao - soup dumplings, and they were pretty wonderful. My one criticism to these were one of my dumplings didn't have any soup. Besides that one small error, it was a wonderful end to a very eventful day!
If you thought that Sunday was packed full of events Monday was even more so. I'm going to try and get caught back up on top of the blogging, but I've just gotten busy. Sorry. More posts and pictures will be coming!
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