Road to nowhere
(Long road: Suzhou, China)
New urban China is a baffling place full of renegade meat products on menus (see previous post), crumbling Classical style edifices mere five years old and of shopping malls fit to burst with high-end goods, but with no customers. China is expanding to contain a wealth of people that aren’t even here yet, or may never appear. Another phenomenon of new areas seems to be ‘the road to nowhere’.
I cycled around the lake one day and discovered whole networks of wide, four or six lane highways with simply nobody there. On a long trail of one particular road, one car passed in the entire fifteen minutes I was grinding my gears along that stretch. As you can see here, there is one family walking along, but they could reasonably have been a mirage, there were no homes, offices, shops nor any amenities on this road as far as I could see. On that side of the lake there’s a hotel with a golf course and a few restaurants peppering the edges of the roads, but nothing more.
There is something shocking about being in China with no other person in sight. I am accustomed to people being everywhere; constantly buying, staring, cycling, driving, speaking, spitting, shouting, running, selling, laughing, smoking… Even now as I write, our ayi* is cleaning the balcony of our apartment. I am never really alone in China, there are too many people here to create an empty space, except on these roads in the middle of a weekday.
* Ayi translates directly as ‘auntie’ but can mean a domestic helper. Madame Zhu (sounds exotic, doesn’t it?) helps us by cleaning the balcony and the wooden floors twice a week. Dust visibly appears on the floor within a day or so because of the winds and the air quality outside. I did it myself for a few months, but it was a couple of hours work for me to clean the floors – she can do it in a fraction of the time (and far better than me).
If anyone can enlighten me on the reason the trees are tied with rope, please do!