I went on a last minute work trip to China at Guangdong city to deploy some Flash apps at Chinaplas 2015. Chinaplas is an annual global trade show for plastic manufacturers to showcase their products. My company’s client for this tradeshow was Dow.
It was my first trip to China and it was rather memorable. The tradeshow was held at the Pazhou convention centre. It is one of the world’s largest convention centre and this particular building was the size of several aircraft hangers.
The Dow booth was one of the nicer booths around. We worked with Kingsmen who did the interior design and build.
The hardest challenge for me for this work assignment was that the computers all used Windows operating system that was in Chinese. I had to put my own laptop side by side with the Dow computers to see the translation.
I wanted to be able to access Google, Youtube and Facebook when I was in China so I got a temporary subscription to a VPN service together with a mobile 3G connection.
We stayed in a low budget hotel right next to a metro train station that was situated near the convention centre. The hotel was comfortable and the staff were friendly and helpful. There was a 24 hour KFC fast food joint next to our hotel which was convenient when we needed an early breakfast or late supper.
One of the most memorable moments was listening to a busker right outside our hotel singing Hai3 Kuo4 Tian1 Kong1. It is a song from the 90s sang by a popular Hong Kong band called Beyond, and it was used as a rallying song by the student protestors in Hong Kong earlier this year to protest against China’s oppressive rule. Hong Kong and this part of China speak the same Chinese dialect Cantonese and I suspect that the people here are sympathetic towards the people of Hong Kong.
The most iconic building in Guangdong is Canton Tower standing at over 600m tall. We paid a handsome tourist fee to climb to the top of the tower to enjoy a panoramic view of the city.
Apart from Canton Tower, there is another popular tourist spot which is the night market at Shang4 Xia4 Jiu3 Lou2 street. It reminded me of Taipei’s Xi Men Ding area. Quite quaint, romantic and enjoyable for a date, with nice food and shops.
lohjianhui 