I was finally free to go to the city on Sunday, and so I did. I started off by going to the SEG electronics market (赛格电子市场) in the Futian area (exit A of Huaqiang Lu station – this for my own reference!). There are several electronics marts and buildings, some more formal than others. The tall building is the SEG building. The inside pictures are from a cylindrical building called Huaqiang Market if I recall correctly. The lighting orbs five floors up on the ceiling change color every few seconds, making for a nice display. Check out the close-up of the green traffic light figure -fitting for located at ground zero for electronics geeks !
My other major stop was at the Children’s Palace station (少年宮站) to go to the Book Experience Mall. At over 74,000 sqm (800,000 sqf) and occupying two city blocks, it is billed as the world’s first and largest retail center dedicated exclusively to books, music and art. Unfortunately for me it has very few English books (probably by design). I bought a country map of China and snapped pictures of the covers of a 600 page tome about the Yin and the Yang and Nelson Mandela’s autobiography in Chinese. (By the way, South Africa’s Chinese population is 350,000. Google ‘Chinese in South Africa and read the The Wikipedia entry for more). I couldn’t resist taking a discreet cell-phone picture of the two kids reading the book together. I envy them with a lifetime of books to read ahead of them! – and thought why do I not make more time for reading myself? The final pictures are outside of the bookstore. There is an open plaza with musicians and singers performing in public. It was such a gorgeous Sunday afternoon and made for a very nice experience. So the backdrop of the musicians and audience picture is the Shenzhen Library and Concert Hall. The dad teaching his daughter to ride her bike and the enormous wavy roof structure is the view looking out from the steps on the way to the lobbies of the library and the concert hall. The lobbies face each other (with the pyramid-shaped roofs). I took two pictures of the roof beams-as-art inside the library before the security guard ran up to me and said ‘no pictures’ !
