City of the Affordable Shoe and Every Other Manufactured Thing

Took more than 24 hrs to get from home to Guangzhou. The financially wise route is not necessarily logistically clever; about 9 hrs after leaving home, we flew nearly right over it. I promise to offset the CO2 emissions by slowing my metabolism to near stop when we get to Philippines.

Guangzhou, formerly known as Canton, sits right in the middle of the area in the world that makes all your Things. Your iPods, plastic christmas trees, shoes, shirts, laptops, webcams, ashtrays, batteries, car wiring harnesses, measuring tapes, kitchen scales, backpacks, blinking led -signs saying OPEN and CAFE, table fans, hearing aids, wallets, extension cords, toys, sunglasses (that you think make you look cool), belts, buttons on your jeans, safety deposit boxes, electrical switches, pens, walkie-talkies and business card holders were all made here. Even if it doesnt say so on the package.

Our hotel sits at the relatively charming Shamian (Sand Surface) island. The island carries influences from overseas trading history, when it had the exclusive position of housing the warehouses of British and French trading companies.

The hotel is nice-ish, and it comes with a complimentary, very much government-controlled, internet-access. I had to resort to level 4 internet communications witchcraft to get around the government sencorship forbidding the access to dangerous and revolutionary websites such as facebook.

Arriving from our hotel at the relatively charming island towards the hard trading core of the city, we came across some shoe stores. And when I say some, I mean around 20 blocks of them. On several floors. Unfortunately for me, none of them dont carry the size "canoe for children, ages 8-12". One outlet even made the effort of having someone ship the largest samples from the factory (fifbeen minid, fifbeen minid) but unfortunately the shoe doesnt get bigger by stamping a larger number on it.

We only stay here for two nights, which is good for now since a city with population of 10,5M is too busy at this early point in the vacation.

Tomorrow, we're off to somewhere completely different.