After dating for over a year now, it was time to make the trip to China to meet Danni’s parents.  It’s always a fairly daunting thing to meet your girlfriends immediate family, and even more so when that family speaks very little English.

I believe we managed quite well with the little Mandarin I do speak and Danni translating the rest (which to be honest was about 95% of our conversations).  I will say that I’ve never eaten so well, or so much as I did under the care of Danni’s family, and they were more than welcoming to me and my odd western habits.

Guangzhou is a little bit like Hong Kong in that you can’t build a proper sky scraper without covering it in millions of colour changing lights in an ever increasing effort to outshine the previously completed building.  It makes for a great evening skyline, but the light pollution (not to mention the normal pollution) is something else.

It’s also a bit of an odd city in that I didn’t notice a single old car and conversely, I didn’t see one new bicycle.  There’s probably something poignant to be said about how this reflects the disparity of the wealthy and the poor, but I’m just not that deep.  Sorry if you were expecting something more!

Danni was an excellent tour guide and we even managed to visit a few spots she hadn’t been to while living there.  Lots of parks and a few ‘Old Guangzhou’ museums balanced nicely with busy shops and crowded high streets.  As it was approaching Chinese New Year the public transport system was heavily burdened and the crush of people in the metro was almost unbearable.  Fortunately taxi’s were incredibly cheap (if not a little bit difficult to acquire) so we mostly stayed above ground away from the shoving millions.

After two weeks I made my teary goodbyes and flew back to London with a suitcase pregnant with even more food; presumably with the assumption that I hadn’t eaten nearly enough.  2kg’s over the baggage limit, but the check-in girl took pity on me…

Lots of additional photos in the gallery here.

With Marnie on her last few weeks with the company car, we decided to head out to Cornwall for the long weekend to get away from the city and do some exploring/camping.  We managed the exploring alright, traveling at random to whatever sounded interesting on the map.  The camping part was a big soggy, and it never really feels like camping without a campfire (which you can’t do here it seems).

Anyways, as you can imagine I had my camera & tripod along for the ride and many photos were taken.  Here are a couple, and the rest are here.