When the land of the dragon beckoned us.....

I distinctly remember the day, 10th Jun ’07, when Vinod and I landed at Guangzhou airport. He had taken up the employment with Capgemini, and that coerced us to make this city our home for that period. All along, as a part of our “mental” preparation of moving over, we had browsed and sought out a lot of information on the city and its “livability”. The sight which greeted us when we first stepped into the city was one that I cannot easily forget.

The ride from the airport to the hotel, Hotel Landmark Canton, in the Honda Odyssey car is still very fresh in my mind. I couldn’t help noticing during the entire length of the journey that the city had only Chinese scriptures everywhere. All advertisements, commercial hoardings, shop titles, everything was in Chinese. Unlike our experience in India where one would be able to see English translations under anything that was in a regional language, this was quite a contradiction.

Vinod attempted to be brave and divert my worried attention to “good things” that the city had to offer. Roads devoid of pot-holes, well-laid expressways from the airport to the city, ample amount of greenery amongst all that concrete gave us a brief idea on the commercial progress this city experienced. All the wide assortment of automobiles that we saw on the road was a sight in itself. Never had I seen so many Audis and BMWs and Mercs and Porsches being driven around so casually as if it were Maruti 800s we see many a times on our Indian roads. The worried creases on my forehead did not disappear so easily; I am adventurous in more than one ways in life, but letting go of “comfort-zones”, “adapting” well to newer surroundings and “drifting with the flow” are something I am a novice at. My thoughts were on how we would survive in the land of meager English, how we would commute to work, what we would eat.. whenever I used to read about China, a mention about their food habits was never untouched upon. Reading about the varied meat varieties they eat always made me feel nauseated, but seeing it was really believing it. Their sea-food included “anything” alive that was available under sea; their non-vegetarian food included “anything” that was alive and moved on 4 legs on land (glad that they taste-buds do not fancy the 2-legged mortals)!!

I was there for a week before I had to head back to India and wait for Capgemini to offer me a position too in Guangzhou so that I could move over to this city. The only good memory I could take back with me then was the vivid picture of the beautiful Pearl River that meandered through the city. Big barges moving lazily on the river, the city skyline on its banks, wide bridges across the river and the numerous parks with well-laid walkways beside the river were sights to behold. We were so struck by the view that we silently decided that we would live in some apartment that had close proximity to this wonderful design of nature.

The months that followed witnessed efforts from Vinod to make me look at the positive side of the move and portraying to me that he has been living there comfortably without any hassle and all the uncertainties that I had accumulated from the earlier visit was completely unreal and baseless. It was more like a “fear of the unknown” for me. Soon when Capgemini rolled out the offer for me too to come on board, I realized that I had to let go of the apprehension and start out on this new journey.

It was 21st November ‘07 when I returned to the city again; this time for a lengthier stint. Surprisingly, fitting in this time was a seamless action and I was quite surprised that it was that easy. Vinod had already spent a good 4 months there before I moved over and being the “solution.com” that he is, had already explored the city and found solutions on our stay, food, commuting and shopping. He had already learnt a lot of local “essential” words which were quite handy in helping us navigate around.

There were lots of restaurants which served food that was “edible”, in my dictionary. Spotting a lot of Indian restaurants were icing on the cake. The city had numerous shopping malls and grocery plazas that one had no difficulty in buying things. We soon realized that the quantity of spices and masalas that we had brought with us from India was enough to start a local shop here. I was awed at the availability of my favourite lady’s fingers, cauliflowers, bitter gourds, peas and all the varied types of dals and lentils that I was so used to. Furthermore, Hong Kong was so close by and any grocery that we couldn’t find here was readily available in that city which could be picked up easily during our regular monthly visits; one cannot believe that they even have betel leaves and nuts available in some Indian shops there. The subway rail system was very efficient and easy to use and so were the accessibility of taxis and buses.

We shopped in all its famous shopping streets; the Beijing road, the Xiaju market, Zhongshan road, ate at most of the small restaurants and the large exquisite ones, the local beer Tsingtao became such a hit with us that Kingfisher tastes primordial, the 6 Banyan tree Buddhist temple, the White-cloud mountain, the Shamian island, the Yuexiu park, travels to Hong Kong, Macau, Beijing were all such distinct journeys in itself. Yes, I am still getting used to looking at the left side of the roads while crossing them, experiencing typhoons, learning to hold my breath tight in elevators to avoid the smell of all the Chinese “delicacies” that arise out of the eaters’ mouths and also to not fall down laughing at some Chinese colleagues’ names like Zero Li, Engine Lin, Easy Chen, Ice Feng, Crisp Ho, Tiger Hu, Piano Huang, Rabbit Lai, Spicy Liu, Tomato Xu, Fish Yu…and believe me we address them with their first names. The communist country, although suppressed in some ways, was enjoying the benefit of a capitalistic economy and we as foreigners in its land get to use the benefit of its excellent infrastructure, the monetary value which is nearly 6 times of our INR (feels nice to multiply our salaries into 6 and look at the lovely figure the calculator throws up) and the respect from the fellow beings in office owing to the fact that we Indians are more “knowledged” and “experienced” in IT and ITES.

10 months have passed now since we had become a part of this city and left our footprints on its sands of time and I must confess that looking at the Pearl River from the window of my 33rd floor apartment is invigorating even today.