Guangzhou, China - 18 hour stopover mini adventure

Cramming as much of an adventure as I could into an 18 hour overnight stopover in Guangzhou, China.
After organising a 24 hour visa at the airport, and changing the £25 cash I had into local currency I took the subway to Kecun station and walked to my hotel near the stunning Canton Tower. A quick turnaround and I was out onto the street for adventures by 10pm. I discovered that the downloaded Google Map of Guangzhou no longer showed any streets, only the remaining points of interest I had marked on it, which served as slightly useful compass point hints at where I wanted to go! (Google & Google Maps don't work in China, along with visa, which makes things surprisingly tricky, having to rely instead on cash where its accepted and helpful strangers.)
At 1.29 in the video you can hear a 'hey!' which heralded the start of my first interaction with anyone on the street. A man in his 50's, seemingly just a member of the public, came up to me and challenged my photographing/ videoing people's apartments. To me everything was just an eye-opening, jaw dropping experience and I wanted to capture as much of it as I could to assist the old memory bank. I tried to explain my innocent touristy excitement and he explained that Canton Tower was beautiful, but not these old apartments. He clearly didn't want me to give the world a bad impression of China. I promptly offered to delete the file and after some deliberation said that he hoped that in my time in China I didn't break any of the rules. I was then able to make my swift and polite getaway and was thankful to be be able to do so. I totally understand his pride and protectiveness and perhaps the invasion of privacy, but it was quite a scary moment. Guangzhou is an old city, 2200 years old to be exact and was a major terminus of the Silk Road. Despite what is quite evidently some incredibly modern and futuristic development, with that history it naturally still holds older parts. Its would be like expecting London to just be a collection of Guerkins!
Anyway my little interaction certainly heightened my noticing of all the CCTV cameras around.
I did later strike gold when asking for directions to Huacheng Square from a lovely chap who had just been out for his evening/night run. To my great surprise and delight he ended up walking and talking with me for the next hour.
I walked for miles open-mouthed at it all and got back to my hotel around 2am. I then got up for an eclectic and awesome breakfast and was out the door by 9.30am for another 2 hours adventuring on the streets, using the subway again to get to a different part of the city for a quick explore. This included checking out sadly due to time constraints only the exterior of Chen Clan Ancestral Hall that you can see towards the end of the video. Then jumped back on the subway to take me to the airport for my flight home. As an aside, sadly the fabulous looking grabber machine with all its fuzzy looking treasure didn't take my money, still not sure why but hey!
From the air the city, at least the parts I managed to see looked incredibly stark, grey and inhumane. I imagine this was the outskirts perhaps, new developments - unclear if residential or industrial... perhaps industrially residential.
Certainly an eye opening experience of an impressive mega city, home to 18 million people.
Video, editing and extra soundscape - by me.
Hope you enjoyed this little video as much as I enjoyed by mini city adventure and my first time setting foot in China.
Warm wishes, James x
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Extract from wikipedia:
'Guangzhou is at the heart of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, the most populous built-up metropolitan area in the world, which extends into the neighboring cities of Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Shenzhen and part of Jiangmen, Huizhou, Zhuhai and Macau, forming the largest urban agglomeration on Earth with approximately 65,594,622 residents[13] and part of the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone.'