After a few days in Beijing, I flew down to Guangzhou to visit my mom who was visiting our family in China.  It was nice change of pace as my cousins would basically provide for everything I needed.  They picked me up at the airport, took me around and even fixed the tears in my bag that I received at the start of my trip.  Seeing my mom was great too!  The day I got there, my mom had made some of the dinner that we had that night and tasting my mom’s homecooked food was just what I needed after eating so much foreign foods.

The next day consisted of visiting Dinghu Nature Reserve which was very nice, however, very touristy.  It is a very well developed park with beautiful forests and lake however, it seemed that at everyturn there was something to get a little bit more money out of you.  (Did you want to ring the ancient bell that gives you good luck? It’s 1 Yuan for each strike, but you really should do at least 3 for good luck… how bout throwing an offering into  the world’s largest ding (ceremonial Chinese pot)? 3 offerings for 5 Yuan!)  It was still a nice stroll though and at the end of the day I was exhausted.

My Keen shoes are starting to fall apart and I don’t think it’s because I’ve walked a lot in them, but more so that these shoes weren’t well made.  It started probably a month into my trip but now the seams along the top are coming apart much more.  When I told my family this, they immediately offered to take me shoe shopping in Guangzhou (they lived in Foshan, a suburb of Guangzhou) which was incredibly nice of them.  I felt a bit bad because there were three of them and we were all looking for new shoes for me and I didn’t find anything that fit what I was looking for.  Most of the shoes they sold were basketball shoes or fashionable shoes and there were very few trail/hiking shoes.  It was a bit disappointed but it did let me see Guangzhou which was incredibly crowded.  We went to the main pedestrian street and there were crowds as far as you could see down the road.  My cousins say that there are upwards of 100000 who walk down the road a day.

One nice thing about visiting this region was that the local dialect is Cantonese which allowed me to get around a bit easier the next day when I took the train up to Shanghai.  I was actually able to talk to others and it was just a really good feeling to be able to do that.