Saturday, July 4, 2009

Business trip to Shunde/Foshan, Guangzhou, China.

It is unusual for me to wake up early when I go on trips. Due to the long day ahead and the fact that we are taking the public transport to Foshan(佛山)in Guangzhou today, I woke earlier than usual.

1st,we take a public bus..

I noticed that every time the bus pulls into the last station,there will be cleaners cleaning up the exterior of the bus. Therefore even the air is more polluted,the bus still look cleaner as compared to Singapore..I wonder how often are our SBS buses given a wash..
The interior of the bus is clean and quite comfortable. No matter how far your destination,as long as you are on this route,you pay 2RMB..This is what I call "public" transport..

The bus interchange is at the famous Guangzhou Railway Station..I have never seen so many people walking about all together at the same time before I came here!

We had to take the inter-province' bus at the Provincial Bus Station nearby..

and arrived at Foshan Bus station..

and switched to take a taxi to get to Shunde..

In Shunde district is this approximately 10km(no,I did not type wrongly) stretch selling furniture..the Shunde Furniture Wholesale Market.
It looks something like this..many of them 3 to 5 times the size of Ikea Tampines stretching as far as the eye could see..


In fact, the interior of the furniture super-mall looks very posh and it was really out of my world to know that they are all selling furniture.

..and they classify each section by using the word "World"..not an over statement to me..

After ordering our furniture and confirming the delivery arrangements, we decided to make our way back using a different form of public transport: The Subway!

The thing that impresses me about the subway train service here is the free umbrella rental service. Riders who need an umbrella can rent it by placing a 20RMB deposit and can return it at any subway stations..seems like both bus and subway service is at least a notch above Singapore's "world class" transportation system..(note in the photo below inside the office the Chinese Characters "Service from the Heart"..can someone please teach SMRT these 4 words please?)


Anyway, this trip was finally concluded when all our orders were received and loaded into our waiting container at Nantian to ship back to Singapore..