The Sights and Smells of Changzhou

Before St. Patrick's Day I went with Sean and Sarah to Metro, the really big foreign supermarket up in the north of the city, to look for some Guinness. We didn't find any, someone must have been there earlier and cleaned out their stock, but on the way there I got a taste of the sort of thing that only happens in China. One little kid who was on the bus with his father decided that he couldn't hold it and dropped hid pants and peed right on the floor. Now the kid wasn't a baby, that is to say he could have held it long enough to at least get off the bus, and he didn't do this by himself, his father helped. What's amazing besides the fact that there was a little kid peeing in the corner of the bus was that no one seemed particularly disturbed by this. I basically ran as far away as I could once I saw what he was up to but no one else even seemed to shy away. When he was done the dad just went to the front of the bus got a mop and tried to clean it up a little. They got off a stop or two later and for the rest of the trip I just had the urge to yell to anyone standing over there, "No! Don't put your bag there a little kid just peed there." I think if I stay in China long enough I'll never be able to be in polite society in the US again since living in China just erodes my manors. I am though used to oddness and disgusting things that would have terrified me before coming to China. It's not uncommon to just be walking down the street and be hit by a horrible smell, something like an open sewer, with no obvious source. After coming back from India I spent a while feeling that China was really clean and civil, but China has a way of reassertion itself that's hard to ignore.