'Golden Week,' China's national holiday, meant that we had a week off to do whatever we wanted. I decided to go south to Shenzhen to meet Julianna, then back north to Hangzhou, where I would meet Freddie, Charly and Lucy.

Getting tickets was a stressful affair. Tickets are only available a week before the journey, and since Golden Week is the busiest time of year, it became a race to get any ticket that wouldn't involve a hard seat or a standing journey. In the end it was a lucky dip - my result was not the worst, but still pretty horrendous:

Beijing -> Shenzhen (10 hours, high-speed train)

Shenzhen -> Hangzhou (24 hours, hard-seat)

Hangzhou -> Beijing (15 hours, STANDING)

At least I would be able experience both the best and worst of Chinese railway.

The journey on the high-speed train had spectacular landscape, especially in Guangdong Province (have a look www.christophmurphy.tumblr.com ), but since it wasn't a hard-seat, there was little interaction with other passengers. I wasn't disappointed.

When I got to Shenzhen, I was a little nervous about being allowed to stay in the hotel. Since my residence permit was being registered, I didn't have a passport. Instead, I had a photocopy and a load of paperwork to wave in people's faces in case I got into trouble - but not technically the correct paperwork (I had asked for it in Beijing University two days before leaving and had unhelpfully been told to come back for it in two weeks).

Luckily, the hotel was fine with just a photocopy (in Shenzhen at least - Hangzhou was another story). After settling down, I went to meet Julianna at Futian Checkpoint on the Hong Kong border (a risky place to be wandering around without a passport). It took her just an hour to get to Shenzhen from Hong Kong, straight from work.

Shenzhen, being only a few decades old, wasn't the most aesthetic Chinese city. There was, however, a fair bit to do there. The next day, we met up with a friend from Cambridge who lived in Shenzhen, Angel. She told us, "There is nothing to do here except eat and go out." This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, and as it turns out, Shenzhen has a very high standard of both restaurants and clubs (Hangzhou, again, was another story).

She also told us that, whilst Hong Kong specialised in Cantonese and Japanese food, Shenzhen, on the other hand, specialised in food from regions all around China, probably because it's such a new city and most of its population migrated from other parts of China. It's often described as 'a Mandarin city in a Cantonese region.' This meant that Julianna, despite still being in Guangdong and only an hour away from Hong Kong, wouldn't be able to rely on her native Cantonese (not actually a problem for her of course!).

Over the course of our week, we ate local delicacies from Harbin, Nanjing, Hangzhou and Tibet. The Tibetan restaurant was a highlight, featuring dishes such as Tibetan pig and yak. To drink there were plum and grape wines (which taste more like spirits). The Nanjing-style food included pigeon and a kind of Chinese bacon roll (called 富贵双方, if you can find it, I highly recommend it). Weirdly, the food we had most of in Shenzhen was congee (porridge). One of our lecturers at Cambridge once told us that the reason the Chinese breakfast hadn't been westernised and congee hadn't been replaced with jam and toast was because it 'warms your body in the most natural way possible.' In fact, this property makes it apparently one of the best things to have whilst ill. Its ingredients vary, and are often not what you'd find in western porridge (I'd be more than worried if I ever found eels, crabs or shrimp in my Quaker Oats). On our first evening in Shenzhen, Julianna and I ate congee; on our last evening we ate congee. Once again, I couldn't help but remember a line from Six Records of a Floating Life:

"昔一粥而聚，今一粥而散，若作傳奇，可名《吃粥記》矣。"

"Once we had porridge when we assembled, now we have porridge and we separate. If someone wrote a short story about it, it could be called A Record of eating Porridge."

The other 'only thing to do' in Shenzhen was clubbing. And yes, the club we went to turned out to be better than any in Beijing, featuring a swimming pool and an eighty-year-old Russian DJ.

We did find various other ways to entertain ourselves in this modern city: on Chinese National Day we visited a theme park that was centred on ethnic minorities in China and their 'primitive' ways. This was the closest we got to any cultural activity.

The best part of this theme park was a performance recreating some historic Chinese siege. It featured a life-size city wall and actors dressed up in armour doing impressive stunts with weapons on horses.

The photos on tumblr best sum up the strangeness of this place (here's the link yet again: www.christophmurphy.tumblr.com )