Notes on Okinawa, Hong Kong and China
A spooky looking empty street in Chikan, China
I was recently travelling around Okinawa (with family), Hong Kong (by myself) and Guangdong Province in China (with a Mandarin-speaking friend). Here are some thoughts and observations I had during that trip.
- The airport in Taipei (which I connected through to get to Okinawa) is incredibly nice and certainly the best airport I've ever been to. Pretty much all the stuff discussed in Dan Frank's (very good) post on Taiwan applies in microcosm to the airport: everything was extremely clean, pristine looking and logically laid out; all the convenience stuff you want when you're waiting around but are totally lacking and/or hard to find in other airports (like charging points, water refill stations) were plentiful (and working!); and most importantly, you get an uninterrupted view of the planes from pretty much every gate.
- Also, there's a library area (in an airport!) near gate D8 which has a book on circa-2000 Japanese web design with pictures, which might make going through the airport worth it on its own.
- The food in all the places was good to excellent in all the places I visiting, but I would say the best food was mostly in Okinawa. Which kind of breaks my theory on why food in Japanese is so much better than in most Western countries, which is that in most places its easy to get around on your feet or by train / bus, so restaurants have more competition and thus more incentive to cook good food. But Okinawa uses cars way more and has a much more skeletal public transportation system, and the food is just as good as on the mainland. This might be just because me or my family is better at picking out good restaurants in Japan, but we were pretty much eating at random restaurants we came across around our neighbourhood or in shopping malls. Also, Okinawan cuisine might just be to my tastes (I managed to get quite a taste for bitter melon, which shows up in a lot of Okinawan dishes, in my time there).
- Overall, Okinawa didn't feel all that much different from mainland Japan (though we stuck to mostly tourist areas and shopping malls, which would obviously be more homogenised), though the landscape looks a lot different, with no rice fields and buildings mostly made out of rather weathered looking concrete. The US military bases were very noticeable, but mostly were just annoying and time consuming to have to drive around to get anywhere.
- Hong Kong doesn't feel particularly British anymore, apart from vestigial bits of street furniture and infrastructure like the double decker buses and the tram, and the occasional old colonial building (which aren't even that unique in Mainland China). But it still felt quite different from the mainland, and that's mainly because it feels a lot more Japanese. There are plenty of familiar (to me) Japanese chain stores and restaurants, you can buy a vast selection of Japanese goods from Don Don Donki, and Japanese pop culture is especially prominent, even stuff that doesn't really get exported to the west like Crayon Shin-chan.
- The (mainland) Chinese infrastructure was as impressive in scale and operation as I expected it to be. The metro system in Guangzhou has 19 lines and enough frequency of trains that you never have to look up a timetable as a train shows up within a minute or two of arriving. The high-speed rail was perfectly on time always, and the stations are like airports in scale. Things seem to get rougher when you go beyond the 'official' physical infrastructure though. The Chinese apps were noticeably clunkier and slower than western ones, and the map apps really don't tell you much about what there is in a particular area. In the nicely done up areas of Shenzhen and Guangzhou with lots of glassy skyscrapers its fairly easy to walk around, but in more mundane areas the footpaths are filled with all kinds of random obstacles: bins, cars and mopeds parked all over forcing you to squeeze between them, mud and debris from construction sites etc. Even in Guangdong, which is one of the (or possibly the most) developed provinces in China by whatever metric you choose, a lot of places have a distinctly 'half-done' feel to them.
- Relating to the above, the strangest experience I had on this trip (and maybe across all the travel I've done) was in China. I'm going to provide my account of that evening with as little commentary as possible, as I'm honestly still not sure what to make of it:
I was with my Mandarin speaking friend in our guesthouse after having a pleasant day looking around the Diaolou of Kaiping (a town about a 1 hour train ride from Guangzhou). We looked around on the map and found a cluster of restaurants in a historic town called Chikan a couple of kilometres away. We decided to take the bus there. Due to being confused by the map app, we ended up getting off one stop early and having to walk some distance to get to the actual restaurant area. We walked through, seeing some of China's infamous 99% completed but totally empty apartment complexes and a mysterious distant theme park looking thing along the way.
After some walking we found a muddy car park with a closed gate, which the map app told us we had to go through to get the the restaurant area. Turns out the town had been converted to some sort of theme park / resort / shopping area and you had to pay to access any of the actual restaurants. After my friend talked to the gate security guards they told us that their gate was closed for the day, but to get in you had to go to the main gate. At that point we were pretty tired but intrigued by this strange place, so we took a DiDi to the main gate area.
The town also had a tram line which cost like 40 Yuan to ride on so we didn't bother
Once we reached the main gate and went inside, things got even stranger. The whole place was filled with nicely restored old buildings (presumably genuine?) with various shops inside, mostly various restaurants and Chinese chain stores but with a KFC and Burger King as well. But the whole place was eerily empty - the restaurants were either entirely empty except for staff or had merely one table occupied, and the fancy pedestrian streets had barely anyone on them. We spent a while wandering around, looking at the old buildings and the combination Christmas / Chinese New Year decorations, before having dinner at a random restaurant inside. According to my friend, when we ordered the restaurant staff asked if we were employees.
The stage area
After dinner we wandered around some more. It was getting dark and misty and extra creepy looking when we stumbled upon an outdoor stage area with a sign saying that there was a show scheduled soon. Having not that much else to do, we decided to stick around to watch the show. Before too long, a crowd of Chinese people began to stream in from somewhere I don't know and fill the seats in front of the stage. The show started before too long, and it turned out to be a elaborate song and dance performance with elaborate rotating sets, dancers, pyrotechnics etc., all culminating in the launching of some incredibly loud fireworks. Once the show ended, the crowd seemed to disappear again, and the town went quiet again. Then we left and got driven back by a reckless DiDi driver that loved barrelling down the damp, dark roads of rural Guangdong as quickly as he possibly could.
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