When I got down to the common room in the morning our Chinese friends were already gone (we'd met up with Bryan and Max's classmate Danching who lived nearby and, conveniently, spoke Cantonese) and Max was dejected and glum, either feeling the weight of a trip about to end or a bout of homesickness that could only be cured with loneliness and baozi. I did find Brennan though, so we decided to go out and try our hand at the subway system and try finding a place I read about in the guidebook, the Guangzhou Orchid Garden.

Before we went out to do anything though, we grabbed breakfast from a little place on the same street as the subway station. I was particularly attracted to the large photo placards on the wall, which meant that we could point and gesture at things and probably get that thing to eat. The place served mostly noodles and broth, and it smelled good, so I was looking forward to the meal, but not terribly excited. That is, I wasn't terribly excited until I started watching the man making our noodles fresh to order. To make the noodles he took a hunk of dough and kneaded it and worked it for a few minutes until the texture changed entirely and what started as a lump became smooth and elastic. To shape the noodles he did magic, arcane things with his hands and twirled the band of dough until the strings of dough lengthened and then ! magically became noodles. These were boiled for a minute and then rushed to a different kitchen area, to be covered in some sort of mild gravy and bright green beans.



And this was after I had eaten half of the delicious meal. Brennan somehow managed to eat all of his, which made me feel as tough my little stomach were somehow lesser. I wanted to eat more, I honestly did, but the idea of eating more and then walking around in the extreme humidity just didn't seem like a good idea at all.

The subway was a remarkably uncomplicated procedure, with fairly intuitive touchscreen machines that told us our fare and dispensed little black plastic tokens that felt like crappy poker chips but whooshed us down the track to our destination anyway.

The garden was the perfect way to spend the day, after the neon of the night before and the modern efficiency of the subway and the general hugeness and business of the city it felt like a respite. The Orchid Garden was a jungle of green best seen through a haze of humidity, for that authentic tropical feel. Yellow flowers littered the ground under nests of orchids that hung from tree branches. I sat by a fountain full of koi and it was so hot and so humid that it felt more like beads of water were precipitating out of the air to collect on me, rather than beads of sweat.







Plunging as deep as we could into the garden took us to a quiet pond full of lily pads and apparently--thanks to Brennan's sharp eyes--delicate water snakes. Water snakes give me the willies, but we sat by the water for a long time, partly for the beauty of the scene and partly because it started raining and we had a nice little overhang to protect us from most of the rain.