Guangzhou is a loud, crowded, busy, thrilling place. At a glance, it looks like any other big city, but it's not. I count 14 super-cranes out the hotel window, swinging concrete and steel through great arcs 30, 40, 50 stories up. Skyscrapers rising out of fields in every direction as far as I can see. The air rings and echos with the pounding of pile drivers and steam hammers drifting down into the streets below like rain. Day after day, floor after floor, steel, marble, and glass replace hewn stones as giant towers encroach on ancient neighborhoods in a violent, relentless collsion of the very old and the very new. Anachronisms are everywhere. This morning, I watched workers install lighting five stories above the sidewalk while standing on bamboo scaffolding lashed together with rope. Here's another one: I can't access my own blog - anyone's blog for that matter. I can post to it, but I can't read it, can't read the comments. And so I I have to wonder if blogs are being filtered. Innappropriate content, perhaps? Strange, to a man who works in the Silicon Valley and lives a few lightrail stops from Mountain View, to think that the Google search engine isn't allowed to locate certain websites. But this isn't Mountain View, it's the PRC.
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