Some Things I See And Do

Babies do not seem to wear dypers in Chengdu. They have pants with a butt flap and the parents hold babies over sewers and toilets, and random places in the street, while the baby pees and poops. I don't really understand how the baby tells the parents its time to use the potty but it seems to work.

There is an expression I heard. "Dogs in Chengdu bark at the sun because they don't know what it is." It's almost always cloudy. When there is a bit of direct sunlight its kind of exciting.

The cars on the street are mostly nice and so are the roads. A lot of VW's and also BMW ride smoothly by. This give the city a quietness which is lovely. This is also because there are a few main streets which are almost like highways and then mostly small streets without too much traffic.

People play a lot of games. Badminton is played on many streets by people working in stores and mostly by women. Tons of people play mahjong in the endless Tea Bars which feature tons of smoke, round tables, and lots of Chinese people playing with domino looking things.

People don't seem to ever build just one building in China. Instead they build huge projects, often gated, with from 5 to 30 buildings. The higher buildings might just be sets of seven while the smaller complexes spread out much wider. I got a great view of this when I was in Kunming and hiked up to a great touristy viewing spot. The buildings often look filthy, and semi deteriorated. The complexes remind me of 'the projects' in New York in the layout but the buildings themselves are way different. There are no flat surfaces on Chinese buildings. Every building has weird terraces, and bulges, and it looks like one story houses stacked on top of each other. Also, pure, rectangular building are much less common then NYC. Buildings will often be strange non-rectangular shapes.

My apartment is in a gated complex of about six buildings and seven stories each. The buildings have the deteriorated look on the outside but every apartment has a little terrace like thing which is too small to sit outside but big enough to hang lots of plants - and cloths to dry. All the buildings have a roof and I hang out on mine. The roofs also have lots of plants and like most of the roofs in Chengdu they feature very strange looking water tanks. These are large, perfectly round, metal and painted white.

There are no trains yet but they are building a subway system. The buses run pretty well. There is a University in the City which is huge - maybe 50,000 thousand students.