The day before we left for Burma, we took a train up to the HK/China border and visited Shenzhen for a day.

Crossing the river into Shenzhen is like stepping into a different world. If we'd travelled two hours north to Guangzhou (or even to the towns a shorter distance away north of Shenzhen), it wouldn't have been nearly as disorienting, because in Guangzhou, despite the fact that everyone can speak Mandarin fluently, what you overwhelmingly hear is Cantonese, just like in Hong Kong. Shenzhen is a whole different story, and Mandarin was pretty much the only thing we heard whlie we were there.

This is because Shenzhen is entirely made up of immigrants from all parts of China. As the richest city in China, people are really quite keen to move there. So it's established its own identity quite removed from the rest of Guangdong province and Hong Kong. So Shenzhen is, in many ways, a microcosm of Modern China as a whole. If you want to see modern China without being encumbered by things such as history, Shenzhen's the place to see it.

It's quite a huge place now, bigger than HK, and full of modern buildings and a nice, new subway. Unfortunately, the countryside has been sacrificed to make way for all this. There are still some hills in the north of Shenzhen, but they're gradually being pulled down to make way for more housing developments, as there doesn't seem to be any environmental protection whatsoever. (Contrast to Hong Kong, which is still such a green place precisely because it has so many protected areas). The other problem is, because of the rate of construction (30 years ago, Shenzhen wasn't much to speak of at all), the city doesn't have a whole lot of character beyond "modern building here, modern building there". Some of the buildings are nice, but on the whole they don't really seem to be build to be striking or interesting in the way the buildings of HK or Shanghai are, so despite the size of the place, there aren't really many sites of interest beyond the theme parks, beaches, etc.

We actually spent half our day visiting Window on the World, a theme park containing miniature constructions of famous buildings around the world. They were all built in different scales, unfortunately, so while you can go up the Eiffel Tower and get a great view of the western part of the city, you could pretty much stomp on Manhattan and crush it to the ground (though doing that is frowned upon). The strangest thing, of course, was wandering around these pretty well-made miniatures of places such as Angkor Wat and Borobodur, with an even more upbeat than usual version of "Jingle Bells" blasting through the speakers. This sort of cultural contrast is another quite strong characteristic of Modern China.

We then took a monorail around the area near the park. There's another park nearby, this time with miniatures of famous Chinese sites, and recreations of Chinese Folk Villages. We didn't have time for that one, though from what we saw it looked like it might be a bit better than Window on the World.

I was actually quite pleasantly surprised to discover that people didn't stare at me as I walked around Shenzhen. Again, this is a huge contrast to Guangzhou and most places I've been to in mainland China, where pretty much everyone did (Shanghai was the only previous exception to that). Well, no-one stared, that is, until one old man got up while we were waiting for the monorail, and paced in front of me, back and forth, staring constantly as though he wasn't sure what a foreigner was. In other places, I might have been amused, but as I hadn't received any other attention like that around here, I screamed at him. He silently slinked away and I wasn't bothered by him again.

Once we were done there, we met up with Alan and Helen & their two kids. Alan is a Glaswegian that used to run my dad's factory in Shenzhen, and we used to see them quite frequently for Christmas and various gatherings. He's no longer with the company, but still lives in Shenzhen, so we went round for a visit. They live in this nice penthouse apartment with private roof, and the roof has been converted into a really nice garden area with another nice city view. The kids are growing up quite nicely, though only the older one can really speak any English right now (they mostly speak Mandarin, Helen being from Tianjin). They took us to our only Chinese meal of this part of the trip (seems like in HK we ate everything but Chinese, strangely), then we headed back to the more familiar city to the south.

And here is the photo album: