Xiaozhou Village

One thing PM and I love to see when we travel are small villages. Big cities are wonderful with touristy things and great restaurants, but its the villages that allow you to see what it's really like to live somewhere. Sunday we got to visit a village within Guangzhou. I guess when cities grow so much so quickly, villages have two choices: 1) get swallowed up and disappear, or 2) get encased in skyscrapers. For Xiaozhou, modern China is just a stone's throw away.

We heard Xiaozhou was home to student artists selling their art on the streets, street food, and has become quite the domestic tourist destination. As we wandered down the winding alleys it was hard to know whether to look up or down as we walked. Looking up unveiled bamboo scaffolding as over half the village was under construction. We saw some very creative (albeit not very safe looking) pulley systems to lift supplies up to the top floors. But if we had kept our eyes up, we would have missed one of the famous village sights- the oyster houses. These houses are from the Qing Dynasty and were built with yellow mud and oyster shells, so they would be warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and impervious to water and worms.

After an amazing lunch of tofu, chicken, ribs, and cabbage, we took a few steps and found ourselves in what looked like a rundown kiddie amusement park. There was a tombstone memorial to extinct animals, trampolines, and Indiana Jones-esque chain bridges.

At lunch we had discussed how we still hadn't seen any artsy things so we felt we were missing something. The village we had seen was quaint, but other than the oyster house, there wasn't anything that warranted it being a touristy spot. After a few more alleys and a motto of "turn left", we found ourselves in a sea of people, artistic coffee shops, and ancient ruins. We found what we were looking for- the clan hall, the old wharf, some street food, and lots of sinking boats. I think the boats were PM's favorite as every new boat was another photo op.