from the middle bunk
By Rachael
onwards to Shanghai, China
We wake to rural vistas blurring past the window. It would seem every square inch of land not used for housing or roads in this country, which is home to twenty per cent of the world’s population, is devoted to food production. Apart from all the usual “greens”, there are waist-high stands of plants topped with bright yellow flowers. There are the now-familiar-to-us waterlogged rice paddies. There are other water-filled patches and ponds containing what-looks-like green Sprite bottles placed at regular intervals attached to lines. Frog or carp swimming pools?
Many of the horticulture sections are delineated by conical conifers. Other trees abound too, among them fruit trees spring-blossoming pink.
A city rises smoking on the horizon full of rectangular plaster-covered brick buildings. The brickworks we’ve already passed with the rows and rows of stacks of red bricks lined up beside long low buildings culminating in tall round chimneys incessantly belching smoke. From a distance, the city looks entirely modern. A six lane black asphalt road approaches it, a white concrete road rings it, sun glistens off the glass in the windows, power pylons provide promise of electricity for residents. But on closer inspection we find ancient crumbling buildings with their curved tiled roofs nestled in amongst the burgeoning apartments with their rust dribbling down the peeling plaster from metal window screens. The hard roads give way to dirt tracks right there in the city. We see a dozen women crouched at the edge of a city-pond scrubbing their washing.
Before too much longer we’re back in the countryside. A lady in purple gumboots walks across a field, hoe on her shoulder. An old man holds a fishing rod, line extended into a pond. Cabbages grow. Haystacks dry.
Another city flashes past…piles of rubbish on the outskirts sitting beside plastic-covered greenhouses, which give way to a sprawling industrial estate and piles of black coal waiting to further pollute the air.
Then more vegetable fields, planted out in strips.
Then a new city. It’s colourful. The street lamps are four large coloured balls on posts. The buildings are tiled green, blue, purple, orange, pink. Disneyland-like, they have steeples, minarets and domes on top.
Then more fields and orchards…..
Then an even newer city. This one is not even complete yet. Dozens of buildings of varying heights, but all tall, shrouded in green netting around bamboo scaffolding emerge from the vegetable fields. And then more of them, metal rods protruding from the walls….and not just one or two…we’re talking a hundred buildings at a time. Old ramshackle buildings are being dismantled, the bricks stacked in piles, to make way for the global-recession-defying development across the Chinese countryside.
And on it goes……
All the way to Shanghai…
(where the people are just as friendly as in the south….where the cutest kids were photographed by customs officials before we even got through immigration…..where a crowd gathered around us outside and someone asked if I was a teacher coz I look like one – he was a singer and *he* looked like one….where Tgirl4 was given a satay stick as we walked past a shop….where the hostel owners and fellow guests had a photo session with the girls…..yes, it’s friendly up here)
Tags: housing, postcard: China, transport
rayres
the flat things being baked in an iron look like krumkaka any idea what they were?
Those flat things were delicious wafer thin pancakes that are rolled into cylinders when they are still hot and cool down to a crisp crunchy flaky mouthful of sweetness! We sure know what they were – we have gone through three bags of them;-) (30 per bag)
THat totally sounds like a krumkaka!