A Visit to Flower Street

One Chinese New Year tradition is to decorate your home with flowers.  To help make it easier to get flowers, a couple of designated "flower streets" have been set up in Guangzhou where all the vendors come together to sell flowers (and of course all the other required new year paraphernalia).  I had heard about these colorful street fairs and wanted to visit one.

There was a bit of a family discussion around whether Tiger would come along to translate or be able to watch a key TV show out of Hong Kong that he wanted to watch.  In the end Vicky's father volunteered to guide us on our excursion so Tiger could watch TV.  This turned out to be a win-win for us, since her father knows all sorts of tricks for getting around Guangzhou.

After a short bus ride we turned the corner to an explosion of color and noise.  I would guess maybe 5,000 or 10,000 people converging on a large section of several streets in a cross-pattern.  Stalls lined the center of the street and the crowd moved by in an orderly counter-clockwise fashion.  People drifted in towards the center when they were interested in something but then moved away from the stalls where the crowd moved them forward.  (Hey, this is a perfect analogy for adsorption chromatography!  A "Flower Street" is a flower lovers separation column!  You can take me to China, but you can't remove the inner nerd.)

Vicky made her way in and purchased some large flowers for the apartment, then her father lead us to the Guangzhou Metro and a nice walk back to her parent's apt.