Power trees
(Powerline through trees: Suzhou, China)
I met a local girl recently, Min, who was introduced to Ying and I through a Chinese friend from Glasgow. She works locally and we arranged to meet at her work – luckily it’s very easy for me to get there by bike or taxi as the Gan Jiang Road runs from SIP, straight across the down town area, true as an arrow and reaches the other side of town. Since I wasn’t entirely sure where exactly I would find her, I felt that a taxi would be the safe choice.
I arrived rather early – the straight road on my map looks like a long one, but with traffic lights displaying green lights all the way, I was there fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. I decided to explore the streets nearby, not realising that we would traverse them a second time on the way to lunch. This is a view back towards Gan Jiang Lu, showing you the way the trees have been guided; directly underneath the power lines. All the trees on this street have presumably been teased into place to allow the power lines to travel right through their branches. You can see the continuous shadow running along the tarmac. I’ve never seen such blatant control of trees in a city, but you might have seen this post before: http://china.analoguegirl.co.uk/shop-trees/ Instead of the trees being manipulated around the people, in these shops, the people have to cope with the presence of the trees. Nature and humans in China have a much closer relationship in some ways than I am used to. The two worlds rub along shoulder to shoulder, cheek to jowl in a way that ‘health and safety’ officials in the UK could not allow.
Min took me to a local place on one of these side streets, famed for its delicious noodles – they were really tasty and there was a veritable mountain of them, I just couldn’t manage to finish it all (and coming from me, that’s a statement of size). Without her, I would have been clueless, the menu is displayed by the entrance and each item is written in Chinese. There are no pictures to point to, ot translations, so I would have been ordering a mystery dish. Come to think of it, she chose my meal for me anyway. As long as it tastes great – I’m a happy girl.
The bikes in the foreground are mostly the famed e-bikes of which Ying and I are so fond. Our friend Dao Yue calls them ‘The Silent Killer’ as they make almost no sound and are lethal in the dark. It seems that battery power can be conserved by not using the horn or lights, so sometimes I cannot tell if one is approaching from behind until I hear the rattle of plastic on metal or the airy spinning of wheels. On several occasions either Ying or myself have leapt in the air with fright and been caught out by this scourge of the streets; in some hands, a fantastically efficient mode of transport, in others, a weapon of noiseless terror. Unfortunately our models are out of action for the time being. A winter of limited use has depleted their batteries and we’re reluctant to concede we may have buy new ones. It may not even be possible to replace the battery without having to buy an entire new machine.
