Nanling Mountain

So on Saturday March 26th, I took a late train to Guangzhou, stayed at my friends' flat, woke up early on a Sunday morning (early enough to see the old folks doing their morning exercises from out of Luke's window), and got on a bus headed up to the border of Guangdong and Hunan provinces. I was headed there to see Back to Zhong Guo: Fools Move Mountains , an intriguing public art project sponsored by the awesome Guangzhou art center Vitamin Space. It took three hours to get there, and the winding roads and jarring freeways were enough to make some on our bus-ride physically ill. After finally arriving, there was a lunch, a school ceremony (of the children who had helped design the garden and would now be in charge of it), a rain storm, a sick friend, a slippery hike up a muddy mountain, some disputes with the child "managers" of the installation, the ultimate dream of a child's playground (an "eternal garden"), then a tromp back down the hill, a cut hand on a rusty can, a soaked notebook, a broken cellphone, a lost cellphone, and somehow a five and a half hour bus-ride back to Guangzhou (resulting in a missed-last-train back into Hong Kong). It was an adventure. You can read more in the article I wrote for The Weekend Standard, an English newspaper in Hong Kong.