Sightseeing & Big Trouble with Little Watches

Ok, I temporarily lost my blogging mojo but I'll try to catch you all up on our Guangzhou adventures. Thursday was an interesting, albeit, slightly slow day. We visited two of Guangzhou's more famous tourist attractions, Dr. Sun Yat Sen's Memorial Hall and Guangzhou's version of Central Park called Yuexiu Park.

The Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall is situated on the original site of Sun Yat Sen's Presidential Office. It was built with funds raised by the local people and overseas Chinese to commemorate Dr. Sun Yat Sen, the founder of the National Party and the first president of the Republic of China. The memorial hall has magnificent exterior and elegant interior decorations. The whole building--octagonal in shape--is of a typical Chinese architectural style. There is also a 15-foot-high bronze statue of Dr. Sun in front of the hall. It must be a magnificent place to see a concert as the unique octagon shape allows the massive roof to be supported without any internal columns. Everyone has an unobstructed view, even in the cheap seats.

Yuexiu Park covers over 100 hectares and is located in central Guangzhou. Well known attractions include Guangzhou’s symbolic Statue of the Five Goats and the Guangzhou Museum. The myth of the five goats is that five gods rode them to town, bringing gifts of grain for the people of Guangzhou. When the gods left they turned the goats to stone to forever remind the people of their good fortune. The park is also home to several beautiful lakes and landscaped gardens.


We got to mix with the locals in Yuexiu Park and had great fun doing so. I played a Chinese version of hacky sack involving an over-sized badminton birdie while holding Naomi in the Baby Bjorn. That got a lot of smiles and proved to be a bit more difficult than planned. Of course, my flailing about with a beautiful Chinese baby strapped to me was generally approved of by our fellow players.

We also shared an orange with four Chinese women while sitting by a waterfall and watched female supporters of the Chinese army march, sing and dance. I think they watched us almost as much as we watched them. The park is gigantic and after 90 minutes we had only seen one small corner but it was time to go back to the hotel.

The rest of the day was relatively uneventful except for a shopping excursion to Watch and Clock city, a wholesale market for watches, clocks and electronics. The watch expert of our group, Bruce, had found out from his watch broker friend that Guangzhou is a good place to buy high quality fake watches (Rolex, TAG, Cartier, etc). The good fakes use real Swiss movements and sapphire crystals - amazing.

After a short cab ride with Phillip, a translator from the China team, we were deep in downtown, right next to the crowded a slightly dangerous bus station. Bruce and I stuck out like NBA players at a jockey convention. Bruce is 6'3" and has bright red hair. People were really checking us out and a few seemed more interested than they should. I think our size was the only thing that made people keep their distance.

Watch City is straight out of a John Woo movie. I kept expecting Chow Yun Fat to jump out with gun drawn while chasing some unsavory characters. If Phillip hadn't been with us no one would have talked to us, especially not the guys selling high-quality fakes. They all thought we were undercover foreign police! Everywhere you looked there were people wheeling and dealing. Everything from $2 Hello Kitty watches to full size grandfather clocks were being hustled.

Eventually we got a guy that looked like a bad guy henchman of a "B" kung fu film to tell us about his watches. The short version of the story is that, after some bargaining and looking at watches in a catalog, he agreed to meet us the next day with watches and with equipment that would allow him to open them and prove they had Swiss movements. We then jumped in a cab and went back to the hotel. More on this later....