Casual International Teacher Conference Day 4: Hong Kong to Guangzhou (or Nansha, really)

Friday, November 28th, 2025

2:10 PM

Guangzhou Ulink International School (GUIS), Nansha, China

The wifi at this school allows me to connect to Google Suite, which Blogger is a part of. Very neat!

Well, I've been busy. Starting with Tuesday morning, I woke up and moved a bit slow getting out of the Kowloon hotel. I left my bags with the concierge and headed back to Hong Kong to check out the Man Mo Temple and PMQ. PMQ was very close to Tai Kwun, and if I had planned things out a bit more, I probably could have done this all on the same day, but I'm happy with how things shook out. 

Seen at a convenience store in Hong Kong.

Idk what it is tho.

When I got off the ferry at Hong Kong, I decided I needed something to eat and some coffee -- and quick, because I had a train to catch in a couple hours. There, I went to a spot that was Hong Kong's answer to the American diner. It was delicious.

The divider allows more than one single person to sit at a table.

Chinese breakfast!

Man Mo Temple is a Taoist temple built in the 1800s to worship Man Cheong (the god of literature) and Mo Tai (the god of... martial arts...?). I lit three sticks of incense and watched white tourists look very devout and respectful, closing their eyes and bowing their heads in reverence at the altars.

After all this, I went to PMQ (Police Married Quarters) to check out what I was told would be a cool cultural center with shopping. Maybe I would pick up some art. It was the last thing I had time for before heading to Guangzhou.

It was more than just art, though! PMQ was originally built to house police officers and their families, but in 1997, when Hong Kong was returned to China, the police force changed, and they began to move the officers and their families out. By 2000, the site was empty of residents, and they turned it into an arts and cultural center.

Hong Kong is just so cool. 

Setting up for an art installation.

PMQ is two buildings and a courtyard in the middle, with 5 or 6 floors of shops in each building -- accessories, perfumes, skincare, artwork, clothing, and cafes. If you want to find something from a local Hong Kong store, and buy it relatively cheap, this is for sure the place to go. Everything was excellent quality and beautiful. I am very glad I brought a big suitcase and checked that luggage.

Art classes for kids here too!

Floors and floors of boutiques! PMQ.

Well, once I was done shopping, I had very little time to get back to the hotel, grab my bags, and go to the train station. I even decided I needed to take an uber from the hotel to the train station.

Except I forgot that, while Hong Kong is technically China, it's not fully integrated into China. The currency is different. They accept credit cards and cash. I can use my Google suite. I don't need a visa to go to Hong Kong like I do the rest of China.

All this to say that I needed to go through customs, which I did not account for, and I fully missed my train.

I frantically sent a WhatsApp message to Ben, the Chinese facilitator who would be meeting me at the train station to go with me to the hotel. I booked any train to Guangzhou and figured it would be fine.

It was not fine. I was originally supposed to meet him at Guangzhou South Station, called Guangzhounan, and my new ticket was for Guangzhou East Station, called Guangzhoudong, which is about an hour away. I had to go back to the ticket counter, cancel my new ticket and get another ticket. All told, I was out another $30, and I got to the train station where Ben was roughly an hour later than expected. 

Bullet trains are amazing.

Guangzhou South was enormous, bigger than any train station I'd ever been in besides maybe Madison Square Garden (bigger, probably, actually, now that I think about it), bigger than some airports I've been to. I was a little lost regarding where to exit, even with some pretty explicit instructions from Ben, but I eventually figured it out (Ben found me immediately, if you can believe it -- I wonder if I stood out at all), and we made our way to the Uber he ordered. The hotel is not really in Guangzhou at all. It is in a placed called Nansha, which is about an hour outside of the city. Ben works with a bunch of kindergartens, creating PBL (project-based learning) curriculum, which is becoming bigger and bigger in China. Chinese education still centers testing, even more than American education does, but every country tries to find innovative ways to teach students.

(I will say that Mississippi decided to go back to basics, regarding the science of reading and math in general, and their scores have skyrocketed.)

China also has a ton of electric cars, as denoted by green license plates. Cars that use gas have yellow license plates.

We made it back to the hotel and went our separate ways. I went to my room, which is a full on suite (bigger than at least one apartment I've lived in), and then made my way downstairs for dinner. I was one of the last people to eat, and I ordered goose and white rice. I wanted vegetables, but the language barrier was more pronounced, and the waitstaff had basically disappeared, so I decided it wasn't worth the trouble.

And then I went upstairs, crawled into bed, and was asleep before I even thought about falling asleep.