Noise noise noise
(Butterfly on the central reservation: Suzhou)
I caught this a few days ago as I was walking home; there are a myriad of insects here that I have never seen before; but I’ve been bitten by most of them (not this one, I should add). I saw a smaller butterfly in cheery yellow flutter through the gardens the other day along with a completely black one the size of a small bird. They only seem to appear on the very bright days, I suppose if caught in the rain, they would be dashed to scraps of wing in seconds.
Mostly I just hear the insects and animals, but rarely see them; I’m desperate to find one of the bullfrogs that noisily belches outside our window on rainy nights, I imagine them to be huge, like the frogs as wide as my hand for sale in the supermarket. I finally found a cricket here for the first time, clinging to a billboard in the street instead of its usual cowardly trick of noisily calling, yet hiding from me in the shrubbery. There is so much sound here; China seems to be constantly chattering and vociferous, never silent. This image seems calm enough, though notice the tarmac in the background; I’m standing on the kerb of the central reservation, no doubt oblivious to passing vehicles and their staring occupants wondering what I could possibly be doing in the road, pointing my camera at the hedges.
Even when the traffic has dispersed and the tooting of horns diminishes, there is always more noise; little sounds of people talking in the night, conversing from balcony to balcony, or the chirruping of insects, frogs, the few birds confused by the ever blinking lights or the infinitesimal sounds of bats, swooping overhead.
