Good things about Guangzhou; Two Thumbs up for the City of Guanhzhou!

We just came back from our two week trip to China, safe and sound! Considering how fearful we were prior to our departure for China, we are happy to say that this was a very successful trip!

View of Guangzgou from the top of Baiyun Mountain, with the Canton Tower in the background.

The last time we visited Guangzhou was the year 1990. Two young children in tow, our family of four embarked on our first family trip to Asia. That trip did not leave us a good impression of Guangzhou as the weather was too hot and humid; it was the first trip for our young sons and we jointed a tour from Hong Kong for a three day trip of Guangzhou.

 We did not see much of Guangzhou and the only thing we remembered was the garbage we saw littering along the highways as the tour bus took us from Hong Kong to Guangzhou and its surrounding cities.

It was a pleasant surprise for us on this trip to discover how much the city of Guangzhou has changed and how hard the people, city officials, and Chinese government have worked at improving the city since we visited it thirty years ago.

Followings are what impressed us the most about Guangzhou on our recent visit to the city:

 1.  Cleanliness of the city – Our memory of the garbage lining the highways, roads and alley way haunted us from our last trip. But on this trip, the city has cleaned up so much that we did not see a lot of littering or garbage! What we saw was uniformed city cleaning crews diligently sweeping and picking up litters off the streets of the city.



In fact, we were so impressed by their work that we stopped, talked to two of the city cleaning crew members, gave them a thumbs up and thanked them for their excellent efforts in keeping the city so clean and pleasant for residents and visitors alike!

One of the city highways of Guangzhou

  

 2.   Greening of the City – It is not easy to keep a city of eleven

million people clean and free of litter and garbage. 

Not only is the city of Guangzhou doing a fantastic job in keeping the city clean, it has even managed to beautify the city’s highways. 

      I was awed by how hard Guangzhou at trying to greening their city by using climbing vines to wrap around 
     and beautifying the support columns under the city's highways!  Seeing these huge green columns remained me of the majestic tall trees we saw in Tuscany, Italy!

    ( City of Toronto can learn a thing or two from Guangzhou and making its city cleaner and highways more beautiful!)

  

City highways in Guangzhou are lined with beautiful flowers!

 3. Affordable and Efficient public transportation – We traveled on public transit systems in a number of big cities across the continents such as New York City, San Francisco, Toronto, Calgary, Montreal, Paris, Rome, Tokyo,  and Hong Kong. The Guangzhou Metro can hold its candle to and at times cleaner and more efficient than some of the subway systems we have taken in our travel!!! Two thumbs up for the city of Guangzhou!

A daughter and her dad on the Guangzhou subway

   

    4.     Improved living standard – It was evident to us that the living standard of  many Chinese has improved drastically over the past thirty years.

     Off course there are poor people living in every country.

Little well dressed girls and their mothers in a park

     However, when we visited our ancestral villages, we did not see the very poor peasants starving or living on a meager existence as described by our parents and in some media. 

     What we saw in Guangzhou on the streets were many happy kids beautifully dressed and taken care of by their parents.  We were delighted to see this happy blissful scenes repeated many times during our trip in China.

     However, China is still a country without universal health care and pollution is a big problem. We did see on two occasions,  family members with their sickly loved ones begging on the street for donations to help pay for their medical treatments. This broke our hearts. But providing free universal health care to 1.4 billion people is a huge challenge! Is it even possible?

     We were glad to see that China has made great strides in improving its country in terms of creating employment opportunities for its citizens, investing heavily and building massive infrastructures such as public transportation enabling the mobility of great number of its people throughout China, and recently, increasing educational opportunities for students from Grade 1 to junior high school etc. 

     All these are good signs of progress and proud accomplishments achieved through the hard work and determination of a stable government and its people.

     It is our sincere hope that China will continue to improve the living standard and especially the medical care, pollution problem and human rights of its citizens!

     R.T.

     Reflections of Our Trip to

     Guangzhou, China