Into the unknown, again...

I have no pictures for this one, I'm afraid, being a little too overwhelmed to take any photos at all. So our visit to Shenzhen will be plain old text - Gutenberg would be proud.
For those who don't already know this, Shenzhen is the area in China that immediately abuts Hong Kong, and has been designated a special economic zone (SEZ) by the People's Republic of China. For us, it is just a few stations up the line on the MTR from Tai Po, through a border crossing, and voilà, or in this case 这里 (if my French to Putonghua translator has any skill at all).
We were taken there by a friend who has been to Shenzhen many times, so at least we had a guide to help us negotiate the similarities and dissimilarities of the other China. The first stop in our day was to go to a spa to have a massage, one of my favourite things, and the reason I had come at all. This was to be a whole experience in itself - I'll try and keep it brief. First of all, the place was like an opulent hotel design of the 1980s; all marble, and froufrou, and lots of highly polished gold. We walked in and were handed wristbands and went to our respective change rooms where we changed into our colour-coded 'lounge-ware' for hanging out in the spa. These reminded me of those things that are sold as 'tropical pyjamas' in Australia, a kind-of open-necked short-sleeve shirt and shorts. All this with much help from multiple attendants in the change-room, some of whom  spoke a little English, though at this stage I was far too mesmerized to say much at all. From there we took a lift up to the fifth floor (yes, the place was enormous) surrounded by other patrons (all Chinese), in their lounge-wear. Did I mention that for men this was a brown and gold pattern, whereas for women it was pink and gold?
As you know, I feel most comfortable in black, preferably from head to toe, so to be skimpily clad in what felt like pyjamas, amongst strangers, was not to be at my best. We reached the 5th floor, and were directed, mostly with sign language, to our various massage-rooms. I'm pretty familiar with a massage table - after all, I did live in Daylesford - but there are always different ways that people do things, so a little bit of communication is needed. In a way it was very touching, because my masseur, a young Chinese woman, assumed that I could speak Putonghua(aka Mandarin). Nobody in Hong Kong up to this point seems to have assumed I will be able to speak any Cantonese, due to my whitefella complexion. This is clearly their own experience of white folks in Hong Kong, and probably proves their cosmopolitanism. So it was nice to be treated as if I could speak the language, whatever the reality.
For the first half of the massage we managed to misunderstand each other at every turn, but eventually we started to get the hang of communicating in some strange combination of Mandarin, Cantonese and English. She seemed to know about the same amount of English as I do Cantonese, so it was slow going, but we at least started to feel like human beings to each other. It turned out that her home language is Sichuanese, as she is from Chengdu, so English would actually be her fourth language - not bad at only 21. It was a good massage, using hot stones, which my Hawaiaan masseur from Melbourne had sometimes used. It was also mighty painful, though I'd expected that, as it has been a long time between massages.
Fortunately I was grateful enough for the massage not to mind feeling so stupid, so often, as I continually failed to understand what my masseur, whose name I learnt and promptly forgot, was trying to say. Part of the problem was one I am experiencing a lot at the moment - if people don't expect you to be speaking their language, they don't even try and interpret what you are saying as their language, and so they don't understand. This was a lot of the problem here. When we started each attempt at communication with the language we were trying to use, ie. Putonghua, Guangdonghua, Ying maan, we were much better off, because we had a clue what we were trying to listen out for.
It was a relief to get out of my spa gear, and back into my street clothes, but this was only the start of a day of more culture shock. One of the most obvious things to notice about being across the border is how many people smoke, and in how many places. As M. said, it was like being back in our childhood, where people walked around with cigarettes in their mouth routinely. To give you an idea how all-pervasive this was, there was a fancy dispenser on the table in the lobby of the health spa, with free cigarettes, and a handy lighter. It was like being in a looking-glass world. Hong Kong has not banned cigarettes in quite as many places as Australia, but it is not far behind. In Shenzhen you wouldn't even know such a thing was on the horizon.
From the spa we headed to a gigantic vertical shopping mall, which our friend described as being a mall 'entirely of fakes'. From what we saw for the rest of the day, this may well have been true, but we have no context of what is normal, or not, in China, to know how to judge it. We did get warned by a number of shopkeepers that the police were on patrol hunting for fakes, and there seemed to be a lot of surreptitious moving or concealing of various goods. I still do not know what to think about all this. There are very bizarre things going on across that border, with wealthy Chinese coming into Hong Kong to buy high-status branded goods, while on the China-side, wealthy Hong Konger and a numbers of gwai lo/gwai po, are buying up very cheap fake versions of those same goods. I know that China is fairly untroubled by the knock-off branded goods, except as far as the pressure they get from other countries and the WTO goes. For myself I think the 'genuine' branded goods with their artificially high prices are just bizarre, particularly given that most of them are made in factories in China as well, with only possible better-quality materials. It all seems deeply meaningless, particularly given that none of this 'stuff' is any better or less damaging for the future of the eco-systems on the planet.
Perhaps the best time in the day was buying teas, and tea canisters, because these are things that are from China, and do not need to be copied or faked at all. This felt like something worth buying in China, and at least had some meaning in that context. The rest of the time we were almost endlessly solicited by a string of shop-owners, 'Missee, come look, cheap [insert product here], very cheap'. It was relentless and after a while took on a surreal quality, like accidentally wandering into one of those cheap electronics stores with too many toys that talk, or laugh, or croak or whatever. More interesting was a section of the mall with perhaps fifty tailors, all one after the other, located near a section with so many fabric stalls that they seemed to stretch into infinity.
At a certain point we were too exhausted to continue, and headed back to the customs hall, and back onto the MTR. The most fascinating part of the day was probably how much it felt like 'home' to be back on Hong Kong territory - back to a world that seemed instantly more understandable and more manageable.
The experience of being in a Putonghua environment reminded me that I am not totally helpless in Cantonese, just as trying to learn Cantonese has made me realise just how much easier it is for me to communicate in Spanish. I remember being in Spain and being pained by not being able to come up with grammatically correct sentences fast enough. Pah! What a luxury! I should have appreciated having enough vocabulary to be able to carry on at least a semblance of a regular conversation, even if I sounded like a stupid foreigner.
It is all a great reminder that you can never know what you have right now, until you lose it, if only temporarily. At this point I can appreciate that I know a little Cantonese, even if it may take me years to become remotely fluent. I can also appreciate all the prolific language skills of the people around me, who so generously and so often make up that deficit.