Saturday Morning Musing

So much for a DAILY dairy...and have yet to get the few pictures we've taken uploaded. The problem with pictures in China is that it is SO CROWDED wherever you are that good pictures are hard to come by. There are a lot of things I'd like to take pictures of that I think you'd find interesting, but am cautious that no one "loses face" in the process. I tryto teach the kids to be very sensitive to that aspect of the culture.

For instance....here we are in a city of over 24 million people and one of the things I find most intriguing are the street sweepers. The roads in Pudong are sometimes 4-8 lanes wide and excellent...but they are swept clean by hundreds of tiny elderly women with traditional Chinese brooms fashioned of a piece of bamboo and a clump of leaves at the base.

Perched on the 38th floor deck the other day it dawned on me that for as much traffic as there is, and as many close calls in taxis that we've had...a daily occurrence... that I hadn't actually seen a traffic accident. Minutes later I heard the gut wrenching sound of metal upon metal and looked down to see that a taxi hit a motorcycle. I wondered how long it would take the police to arrive...they never did...and after about 15 minutes the taxi left and some from the crowd that had gathered help the cyclist push his cycle at least 20 city blocks out of my range.

Three city sweepers on neighboring streets converged to clean up the mess in the roadway. From my vantage they looked like lithe Pac-man figures hurrying to the spot with their hotdog vendor type dirt bins and brooms. My heart really goes out to these tiny grandmotherly types. The weather has been extremely hot all week and the heat that emanates from the streets and buildings is brutal, yet they are out there from sun-up to sundown every day.

Likewise, you will find patch of lawn or landscaping being tended with scissors by a group of elderly men...I'm not kidding...they cut the grass, even soccer fields with handheld scissors. Yesterday we spotted a group of same under an aqueduct and at first glance I thought it was a group perhaps playing Mahjong. No, they were clearing a small park sized area for landscaping...by hand, literally weeding it clean.

Each year millions of Chinese from the outer provinces make their way to the city to make a better life. There is a glut of labor and a problem with unemployment, there are simply so many, many people. On the one hand it is ingenious the ways they think up to keep them working, on the other it is hard to see the elderly working so hard for literally pennies per day.