4-5 Sep 2007, Shenzhen

After four fascinating but ultimately uninspiring days in Hong Kong – and a new visa - I crossed the border back into China proper, at Shenzhen. It felt great. People were to-ing and fro-ing once more with that frenzied rhythm absent from a seemingly straightforward Hong Kong, the waitresses in the restaurant were comprehending my Mandarin, even the immigration officials glared at me with suspicion. He he - the old China!

But the feeling didn’t linger long. And now, already, even just the very name Shenzhen is starting to turn my blood cold.

I headed off to the cheap hostel suggested to me by Casey from the Peace Corps who I met as we both awaited our new China visas in Hong Kong.

At first it was the all-too-white super-clean interiors of Shenzhen’s subway system that seemed to immerse me in some kind of sterilised test tube; and was it idiosyncrasy or simply irony that the only advertisements appearing in my carriage were for mouth wash? Like their backdrop, the commuters’ expressions were blank and lifeless, seemingly bored with even the notion of a destination. It was horribly reminiscent of the book written by Aldous Huxley that always bothered me, and still does - ‘Brave New World’.

Yet it’s not merely the apparent cultural barrenness of this place that irks me. It’s also this American in the youth hostel which fate threw me beside as I wait now to find if I have a bed for the night. He’s been rambling about the wonder of Las Vegas. Now it’s college life and American football. And now I realise this is one of the two Americans Casey had warned me about. “You see, Shenzhen is a great place to live – it’s closer to civilisation. And there’s plenty of things to do in this city –you can go downtown to Subway or Starbucks, you can go and pick up cheap whores.” I tell him I want to see something Chinese - after all I am in China - to which he rapidly, and resoundingly, retorts, “Are you serious?”

Before I simply mash it up, I’m out of his face in a flash.

I spend the night – I meet a drug dealer, an uninteresting Australian and a pommy who gets so excited that I’m a reggae dj and plays me Shaggy! The next morning, I’m gone!