About Town

Teddy came in this morning and gave me a map of Changzhou, while it was all in Chinese characters he did point out to me about where we are and some features of the city. It's pretty sprawling having apparently taken over at least one nearby city in the last few years. The center of town, around where the rail station is, is a short bus ride, or about an hour and a half walk from campus. I walked about 1/3 of the way through some interesting streets and a lot of vendors. Crossing the streets is still the most harrowing part as it usually unclear when the appropriate time to go is since there are basically no rules for when a car can and can't make a turn. Near the school was an open air market which is almost exactly how you might imagine it. There are lines of vendors selling all sorts of fresh meats, fish, and vegetables. The guys with the meat would sit around swating off flies and talking to one another. The fish in some of the bowls seemed to be still alive and I have no idea how recently they must have been caught. The people seemed amused by me waling around taking pictures of them while they went about their day. I'm not sure I would be quite so accepting of someone walking up to me and jsut snapping away with a camera, but they don't seem to ill disposed toward it.

Changzhou has a huge number of water ways cutting all through it as you can see on the map, but Teddy tells me that they are all actually man made. Most seem pretty slow moving and smell a great deal. There are a lot of houses lining them and all I could think of is the contrast between these crowded houses lining a disgusting canal and Nanny and Poppy's big back yard on the Hudson. Back along the main street there were a lot of little shops selling food, cigarettes-which I imagine are totally unfiltered, and all sorts of other things. There were a really large number of barbershops, I must have passed at least six and there were a bunch more in the other direction. I'm told some are poorly disguised fronts for prostitution, but all the ones I saw people were getting actual hair cuts. People on the street were playing some sort of board game that looked like a more complicated version of checkers.

The park I came to was amazingly beautiful. The city got a lot quieter as soon as I entered it and people were hanging out doing all the usual Sunday things. I saw families and old men flying kites and a lot of people just sitting around. The park is centered around a lake which has an island in the middle and a low bridge out to across part of it. On one side of the park was a big statue to what looked like some sort of warrior from the 5th century but I couldn't read any of the description besides the dates. Back on campus I was starving and a lot of the places to eat were closed since it as in between lunch and dinner. A few places though had fried chicken which I ordered by a series of points. I don't know if it was just because I was hungry or because they fried it right in front of me but it could have been the best fried chicken I've ever eaten. That place never seemed the busyest, I wonder if the prices are considered high for the students. I paid 3 yuan, or about 45 cents for the chicken and alter I had a chicken sandwich which was 5 yuan or about 75 cents. On the street earlier I also had some sort of fired bread thing which is a little like pita bread but greasy for about 2 yuan. It's amazing how much you can communicate with pointing and miming, I'm going to be a champion charades player when I come back, you don't want to know what the mime for toilet paper is.

There are a bunch more pictures with caption on Flickr now so go check them out also. I upgraded to the better Flickr account to hold all of my pictures.