Guangzhou is one of the safest cities I've been to. We walk the streets at night in a loose group, usually around the Beijing Pedestrian Street area (北京路), and never once feared for our safety. There isn't bands of pickpockets roving around the metro stations like in Rome, and Guangzhou's tourist attractions are free of scammers common in other cities.
That said, it doesn't hurt to be wary of non-violent crimes. Standard precautions apply while traveling by public transport - sling your bags to your front to avoid presenting yourself as an easy picking for pickpockets, and avoid using your phone if you're standing near the metro doors in the train (people may reach into the train and snatch your phone just as the door closes.) I seen nothing to warrant such precautions, but still, it's what the locals do, and it's better to be safe than sorry.
One feature of the city is how much they seem to value safety: at metro stations, bags have to be fed through X-ray machines a la airports, and commuters have to clear metal detectors before getting past the gantry. If you're as easily confused at directions like I am (with subpar Chinese reading skills to match!), be prepared to re-enter each gantry several times looking for the right way out.
Getting Around
Traffic laws in Guangzhou are friendly towards cyclists, and it's one of the reasons why bike-sharing programs like Ofo and Mobike are able to take off rapidly in China. One of the more curious traffic laws in Guangzhou regarding bikes had me stumped: traffic lights do not apply to bicycles. It's always a little of a shock to the unsuspecting pedestrian (read: me) when the Green Man flashes and I thought it's safe to cross an intersection, only to get bikes whizzing out at me as I step off the curb.
Otherwise, walking in the streets of Guangzhou is similar to most other Asian countries. People are used to being in close proximity with one another and small jostles on the streets are common. An apology, though nice, is not necessary or even expected in Guangzhou. (Which, now that I think about it, may not be all that different from certain European countries...) So don't be offended if someone barges right into you, and then pretended it never happened. I've walked into a few people too, and they simply shrugged it off and continued on their way without making eye contact.
Dining
大众点评 (da zhong dian ping) is what the locals use to rate restaurants, but you're mostly plain out of luck if you can't read Chinese. Local recommendations rarely filter over to the English-speaking section of the internet, and most of the restaurants that enjoyed tourist fame in English-speaking websites are not as well regarded by locals. It's really a shame to come to Guangzhou and miss out on the excellent Cantonese cuisine! I've listed some of the restaurants that my relatives recommended in my previous posts, and while their recommendations seem strangely congregated near 北京路 Beijing Lu (their area of residence), I haven't had such superb Chinese food before, or since my visit. In my future travels to Guangzhou, I'm looking forward to exploring meal options in other districts, but the restaurants that they recommended are definitely worth a revisit (or several!).
Dining etiquette in Guangzhou can be a little different from the rest of the world. I remember on my first visit, my relatives were utterly bemused when we loaded food onto our plates to eat. In most traditional restaurants in Guangzhou, the plates are considered unclean, and plates are solely relegated to holding discarded food waste.
Rule 101 of the Guangzhou Dining Etiquette Handbook (TM): the utensils that haven't been washed with tea are not clean enough to come into contact with food. In dim sum restaurants, the teapots come out alongside basins, the latter is where you dump out tea that had been used to wash utensils. First, set your chopsticks into your tea cup, and then pour tea over the chopsticks into the tea cup to 'rinse' the chopsticks. Second, remove your newly-cleansed chopsticks and dip your soup spoon into the tea. Third, pour the tea into the bowl, and, holding your tea cup horizontally, submerge it into the bowl. Give it a good 360-rotation in the tea, to clean the part of the cup that comes in contact with your mouth. Discard the tea into the giant basin; your bowl, chopsticks and soup spoon are now good to go! It's also considered polite to move around the table washing other sets of utensils, though those more fastidious about cleanliness may choose to do it themselves...
Notice how the plate doesn't get a wash with tea? Hence, no touchy touchy with food. I made the faux pas of putting someone's newly-cleaned soup spoon on her plate at the start of dinner, and I don't think she used her spoon at all throughout the dinner.
Germaphobic-culture aside (this ritual honestly could be just my family), dining in Guangzhou is a visceral pleasure. I even got to experience the joy of Chinese customs of walking around the table toasting individuals with shots of bai jiu, with the aim to get someone else more drunk than yourself. The potent shots of moutai get the job done fast, and it's always fun to try and negotiate toasts coming your way (or when failing to not take the shot, to rope others in so they have to down a shot with you too.) It's fun, so don't miss out on the drinking! After I experienced the fun of walking around the room
As with drinking, clamouring over the bill is another game which everyone is expected to partake. It's a social nicety, much like the equivalent of a grocery store cashier in Melbourne asking how your day was. Not making an attempt to pay is the equivalent of staring blankly at the cashier. Cheeky acts, like sneaking off to the cashier under the guise of going to the restroom mid-dinner, or hoarding the bill under your utensils to make sure no one else can pay, is commonplace. My relatives pulled off some impressive vanishing feats during dinner, and I was none the wiser until I too sneaked off to the cashier, only to be told the bill had just been settled. (Less successful vanishing acts typically end with the person being escorted back to his seat by a crowd of table-mates, all of whom are pleased they caught someone else in the act, and are most probably eyeing the bill so they too can sneak off later with it.)
Table manners are simultaneously more relaxed and stricter. Spitting bones out onto your plate with merry abandonment? Pfff. No one's going to bat an eye. But for every new dish that arrives at the table, no one touches the food until until the guests sampled the dish first.
If you're like me, a dinner like this may fill you with joy, anticipation and a wee bit of stress. But mostly joy. Enjoying a meal with my relatives - what with my crap Cantonese and all - is some of the most fun-packed dinners I had.
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China's pace of development is impressive, if not a little scary. Six years ago, we gingerly watched our every step, for fear of stepping onto spit on the sidewalks. Restrooms in restaurants were universally filled with cigarette smoke as smokers smoked away wantonly between dishes. Barely six years later, it's a wonder to see how much the city has cleaned up.
Before heading off to China, we downloaded a few apps onto our phones to make life easier. The user interfaces are in Chinese, which I'm honestly not all that literate in, but still, I used those apps on a daily basis. WeChat is essential to keeping in contact with one another. Whatsapp is blocked, as are Facebook Messenger, Instagram Message and Snapchat. We got by for a bit using iMessage and FaceTime between iPhone users, but you're plain out of luck if someone is a non-iOS user. It's even worse if you're an Android user - Google is blocked in China, and this means Android users can't access their Google Play to download these apps once they reach China, so do download everything you need to before you depart! (As an aside, that means that my blog, running on Google, is blocked in China too... sigh).
Google Maps doesn't work either, and you'll have to use 百度地图 (baidu maps). 大众点评 (da zhong dian ping) is the local Zomato equivalent for restaurants, and is useful to have on hand when searching for nearby dining options. Another app that was recommended was 蚂蜂窝自由行, which I didn't use, but was described as the local Tripadvisor.
Our cousin-aunt bought us an affordable phone plan aimed at locals - a RMB100 plan that provides 800MB/yuan. Otherwise, data is pretty expensive for foreigners; the cheapest I've seen was RMB200 for 9GB of data. It may actually be cheaper to buy roaming data from your existing phone provider - it's what a friend did, and miraculously, using one of Singapore's phone provider's network, he could still access Facebook and Whatsapp. Hmmm....
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A big thank you goes out to my relatives in Guangzhou, without whom this itinerary would otherwise not be possible.
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