Adventures in Guangzhou!

Anyhow, I had to jet out from my last class and meet Carol at the subway around 3pm in order to start our trek. It turns out the show was not a public performance, but rather a special gig for university students to showcase their new album and upcoming public performances. The show was way out at what's called "University City," a large area in the southeastern section of the city, where about five different local universities all have campuses for their freshmen and sophomores.

Though we could have taken a long bus to get there, we opted to take the subway instead. I'm not sure if we made the right choice, but we did end up having to switch lines twice which was interesting. The stop for the southern section of University City is located on Line 4 of the GZ subway system, a new line which opened up January 1st of this year. It was my first time in this part of the city and I was curious to see what it looked like.

Making our second transfer on to Line 4, there were a few stark differences that immediately stood out to me. First, the subway car itself. In Lines 1-3 there are English translations of the stops or, at the very least, perfect pinyin romanizations of the Chinese. In addition, on all three of those lines they make announcements in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. Not so, there on Line 4. Half the of the roman letters were pinyin but half were some bizarre pronunciation system unlearned by me. There were no English announcements and certainly no English-speaking employees.

The second difference was the people. Given that Line 4 services University City and other far-reaching locales, I guess it shouldn't have been too surprising that most of the people on board were younger college kids and poorly dressed workers. Not only that, but for the first time in ages, I noticed a lot of people staring at me. On the other three lines people tend to be slightly better dressed and accustomed to foreigners, probably due to the concentration of wealth and business. More often than not I am still the only foreigner on the train, but nobody looks at me like I'm on display. Not so on Line 4.

The third difference was the exit out of the subway. After we got out of the train car and walked up the escalator, I was shocked to see what was outside--a whole lot of nothing. Whereas in other areas of the city you exit to towering skyscrapers, chaotic traffic, and tons of people, over there you walked out into what could have passed as farmland. I looked a little farther down in each direction and saw the vague outline of university campuses, but the stop itself was pretty isolated. It was actually really cool.

So onward we walked to the South China University of Technology. It was apparent right away that we were not the only ones that had heard about the special concert. There were tons of people flocking out of the subway and many more exiting buses. As we arrived at the main gate, the first step was to locate our tickets. Apparently they were given out to the college students for free but outsiders like us were scalping them from uninterested students. Carol's cousin secured one seat for her and then we found another guy who would sell to me. He started to explain some caveat about my ticket but Carol pulled me away in search of her cousin. Fair enough.

We found her cousin and joined her friends in the waiting line. The first thing I thought was that half the campus must have skipped class in order to wait on line for a good view. The line to get in the gates snaked, literally, around almost half the campus. There were thousands of people there easily and I was very curious to see how long that many people would wait in a line. Well, it didn't take long for various "sub-lines" to branch off from the main line, quickly creating mass chaos. It was nice to chat with Carol's cousin and her friends but when the line finally started moving I told them to grab hold of me and not let go until we were inside. Sometimes, size has its advantages.

After an hour and a half of standing, we finally made our way to the gate and the ticket checkpoint. I had no problem initially getting in but I was slightly concerned about following the rest of my group into the special student section up front. This section was reserved for University of Technology students while the back section was reserved for other university kids and outsiders. I thought I would have to be relegated to the back but I should have known better. I guess in the end I just used my secret/invisible "foreigner's card" to get in. In other words, they were temporarily mesmerized by my white skin and let me in without a single question. I wasn't too surprised--in the entire area of roughly 10,000 fans there was not a single non-Chinese person there besides me.

We hustled in and grabbed seats. Well, actually, the seats weren't seats at all, but rather standing space in a giant open field. The place was mobbed and, not surprisingly, the crowds were not shy about pushing. As I jockeyed for space close to the stage, I had to fight off a number of people all trying to shove me out of the way. Just imagine what it's like in the States and then imagine it in a situation where pushing is not rude. Oy. Anyway, I boxed out like an all star power forward and made room.

Eventually the sun went down, the lights went up, the concert started, and people went nuts. It's always exciting to be at a concert when the crowd and the band is really into it and this was no different. I would say that Mayday's style was some sort of combination of the Beatles, Guster, and J. Geils Band (without actually being as good as any of those groups). They were a fun pop-rock group that really got the crowd into the show. I could follow some of the slower songs but was forced to rely on Carol for translations of most of the other tunes. Some of them were laughable (e.g. a hard-rock sounding song about puppy love) but overall I really enjoyed it.

The trip home was a major test of claustrophobic inclinations, but I guess the mass exit of every major public event is the same way. I did survive the crowds and went to bed very pleased with the experience. The next day I even went out and bought their CD--consider me the newest wuyuetian fan.