Shenzhen is a dangerous place! Ooooooooh by god it is, or so your colleagus will tell you if they find you’re travelling there, they’ll have you believing you’re travelling to Mogadishu or Bogota. “One time there was a woman” one of them tells me, “a man tried to take her bag but she wouldn’t let go, so he took out a knife and chopped off both of her arms…”; “if you ever meet a girl and she offers to come to your room then you must say no. If you let her into your room she will kill you and steal all your things” another tells me. There’s not a lot you can say about stories like this, they’re almost certainly urban myths and nobody I know actually knows anyone who has been a victim of violent crime (although I’ve met people who had their bags snatched in Shenzhen or Guangzhou so it certainly seems that crime is more prevalent than in Shanghai).

Anyway, last week I was stopping in Shenzhen city centre by myself for the first time (I’ve been there before, but normally with a chaperone who makes sure I don’t leave the hotel), I arrived early on Wednesday morning to meet a customer with a HK colleague, later as he dropped me off at the hotel he left me with the words “I would recommend you do not leave the hotel”. So anyway, it was with this advice still fresh in my mind that I went for a walk around the back streets close to my hotel, I took off my watch, left behind my wallet (just in case) and off I went with just my camera (bloggers never leave home without one), a few hundred RMB in cash and my mobile phone.

But before we get into that let me start by saying that I wasn’t staying in the best of areas and not the best of hotels, the “Grand” Chu as it was so called. Actually the hotel wasn’t too bad for a couple of hundred RMB, free internet etc, the room was quite large but the bed was a bit on the hard side. The first morning I skipped breakfast and left my 15th floor room at 8:45 am to meet the customer, I was just walking to the lifts when I heard a PING, the lift doors opened and I was almost knocked down as 10 local Chinese ran out from the lift and straight through the door behind me which led to the stairs. “There’s a fire!” I thought, until I noticed them running up the stairs instead of down, very curious. I got in the lift and exited on the ground floor to find a queue for the elevators which backed up straight across the lobby and approached the main doors, I’d estimate around 100 people waiting for the elevators. It turns out that the top half of the building (above 15) is an office block, the lifts are separated, hotel lifts on the left (only going to 1-15), office lifts on the right (floors 16-29). Of course, being China, the office workers from the lower office floors just cram into the hotel lift and then just run up the last flew flights of stairs (always run in China, never walk) meaning that the hotel guests have to fight it out with the office staff to get back to their rooms after breakfast (to be fair, on the second day there did seem a little more order, there was a guy stationed outside the elevators trying to stop office staff from taking the hotel elevators).

For eating in the hotel you have a couple of choices, on the first night I ate at their Western restaurant on the ground floor and chose the fillet steak, it didn’t look at all bad on the menu, served with sautéed potatoes and various vegetables, but when it came the steak was small (I’d estimate 6oz or so) and served with several thin slices of raw red pepper which I think was only there to make it look nice, no potatoes, no vegetables, nothing, just a chunk of meat with a garnish. I was just raising my hand to ask where the rest of my meal was when a waitress came across carrying a small bowl, “great” I thought, vegetables! She put it down, ah, it’s a bowl of rice… I complained, they brought across the hotel manager, she didn’t understand what the problem was, I compared my plate to the one in the menu “but this is just a picture????”, “yes, a picture with a meal on it, not a snack”, “do you think it is not enough?”, “yes, I think it’s no enough”, “would you like an extra bowl of rice?”, “no, I want the sautéed potatoes and vegetables I was expecting”, “but sir” (looking around wildly as if I was insane) “that is just a picture!!!”. I gave up (what was I thinking I could achieve by complaining?) and downed the steak (which tasted pretty good after all that) in 4 or 5 mouthfuls before nipping across to the hotel shop to buy a large pack of Lays and a Dove bar to take back to my room. The other restaurant in the hotel was a Chinese restaurant, I went there for lunch, I don’t even need to comment, have a look at this picture of their head chef (apparently some kind of war hero) amongst their racks of wine.

A smorgasbord of wine – to suit ANY taste (as long as it’s Great Wall red wine)

So, anyway, where were we, oh yeah, I’d taken off my watch, left behind my wallet and gone for a walk with just a few hundred RMB, my camera and my mobile phone, like a lamb to the slaughter!

The area around the hotel was pretty much like some undeveloped area in Shanghai, lots of small shops and restaurants, side alleys with card games etc. It all felt pretty much like home really, certainly no hint of the den of thieves my colleagues had hinted at.

It’s the kids you have to watch out for, the second your back’s turned they’ll walk off with anything

As I walked further away from the hotel there was a definite different feel about the place, it reminded me more of the back streets of Hong Kong than Shanghai. I purposely picked some of the dodgier looking side streets and walked down them, again, nothing that looked particularly unsavoury or dodgy (whether I’d walk down these streets at night is a different matter!). I walked through markets, residential streets and nothing (save for the curious stares which I barely notice now)

That night I went out for a beer and got chatting to a fellow Brit in a bar called XPats Bar, he laughed when I told him the stories my colleagues had told me, “Shenzhen is the safest place I’ve ever lived” he explained, “much safer than anywhere I’ve lived in the UK, there’s police and security guards everywhere in the city centre”, I think he’s right, London was recently listed as the 10th most dangerous city in the world (a US city was even higher), no Chinese cities appear in that list for crime.

“There are still some areas I would be extremely careful in” he added,”where are you staying?”, “the Grand Chu”, I said “yeah that’s one of the areas”..

Maybe I got lucky…