A day off in Guangdong

Before I begin, I'll start with a disclaimer.  I said goodbye to Liz today.  She's the love of my life and, after three weeks of sharing this Fellowship with her, she had to return today.  The drawback of working with family is it becomes difficult for us to coordinate time off sometimes.  Everyone back home has been great to allow us to leave together for three weeks.  While it is a slightly slower time of the year, with both Liz and I gone, that's 1/3 of the farm's workforce being halfway around the world.  So while the travel part of my Fellowship is only halfway over, I'll have to finish it without her.  It'll be great, but it won't be the same.

Yesterday (Saturday the 27th) was a day of "Rest".  A day of rest on the calendar rarely means that on this trip, it just means that we don't have Fellowship meetings or trips planned, instead its what we want to do that day (or more commonly, its traveling from one province to another.)  Saturday Liz and I took advantage of our last day traveling together to hit a few markets, walk the streets of Guangzhou, and take in some culture.  We first hit an art market.  About a quarter of a mile, both sides of the road lined with shops selling mostly paintings and calligraphy.  We saw a few items we liked, but nothing we bought.  What I liked was it was one of the first markets that we had gone in that was obviously NOT geared for tourists - foreign or domestic.  The sold most of the art in frames, and most of it was pretty large (nothing that anyone would ever be able to fit in a suitcase.)  We just spent some time walking and looking.  Also pleasant was the low pressure nature - no constant sales people pushing their goods in your face.  From there we grabbed a cab to the Antique Street Market.  This place was again, not a place catering to tourists.  There were some obviously very high quality products (thing 6 foot by 4 foot ivory carvings for $750,000 and the like) and some not so old.  I got a kick out of walking by stores stocked with appealingly old furniture, advertised as such, and then watching the shopkeeper, just outside the shop, taking new tables and wearing them with scrapers and sandpaper, and then oiling them.  I'll give them credit, they were darn good at it, but it was a kind of giveaway.  From there we walked about a mile and half to the Chen Family Academy, now the Guandong Folk Art Museum.

This was a building built in 1890's by the 72 Chen Family Clans from the various villages across Guandong Province to act a chamber of commerce and family boarding house for the students who went to Guangzhou to prepare for their exams.  The buildings themselves where the best works of art in the place, but there were also some very impressive items on display:

The buildings themselves had amazingly detailed brick
carvings and sculpturing on the roof lines

The courtyards were filled with bonsais of various size
and specie

This work of art was about 5 feet wide by 3 feet
high, and is some of the most detailed, intricate
needlework I have ever seen.  This is just silk
needlework on a silk background.  Amazing