Hello family and friends, my month of communication silence has come to an end (actually I’m writing this while in China to post when we arrive in South Africa). What strange, but good month it’s been. I can’t tell you the name of the city where we were for security purposes, so we’ll call it City X. I will be writing series of blogs about this unnamed city of mystery. During this series as well as any other time I write please feel free to leave me questions or comments at the bottom of each post and I’ll do my best to get back to you.
City X – The town
City X sits right on the Yellow River and is surrounded by what we think are the foothills of the Himalyas home to Mt. Everest. The best way I can describe this strange place is by comparing it to a movie set under construction. There is hardly a complete building in the entire town. It’s as if someone closed there eyes and pointed to a map of a china and said “We’ll build a town here”. Did I mention that the construction is 24/7? Every few days a new store opens, which is celebrated by blaring music and shooting off various fireworks in front of the store for the entire day.
So far there have been several grocery stores, home appliance stores, cell phone stores, motorcycle shops, and a number of resteraunts that have been completed. Now these aren’t the size of the stores you are probably imagining. Most are the size of a small convience store at best. The grocery stores vary slightly but most sell loose leaf tea, a couple different kinds of produce, bottled drinks, packaged snacks and some basic home goods such as batteries and toilet paper. Some stores also sell a few different types of bulk foods such as dried bananas and peanuts. As I mentioned above the resteraunts are probably the most numerous in this city. One would think that this would lend itself to a large variety food, but that would make you very wrong. All the resteraunts practically serve the exact same food. I’m still trying to figure out how a town can support 15 establishments that serve the same food but they all seem to be thriving.
City X is also home to at least one elementary school and middle school. We got to know some of the teachers at the middle school and learned the school has about 400 students and 100 staff. The staff and most of the students live on campus in dormitories. The middle school has a large court yard with 4 dirt basketball courts and about two dozen outdoor ping-pong tables. By the way, I’m 3 for 6 in games of ping-pong against the Chinese. Not too bad for a white guy.
