Suzhou Blue
(Blue sky near home: Suzhou, China)
As I was walking to the bus the other day, I noticed to my utter surprise that the sky was blue – really blue. Occasionally at the weekends, especially on a Sunday, it is possible for the sky to reach this colour, but more usually it is white and hazy, like today. This day was a Tuesday so I can only attribute it to the recent holiday in China celebrating it’s sixtieth year. Many factories were shut for several days as people were allowed some unusually generous time off. Today there is a lot of sun but the sky looks cloudy. It takes some getting used to, but it is preferable to the driech Scottish weather that usually abounds this time of year; drizzle, murky cloud, cold and difficult dank mornings. I’ll take China’s easy Autumnal haze any day.
Ying’s mum has arrived safely and will be staying for the duration of the rest of my time here. I leave here again for the UK in a week and a half so I don’t have the luxury of the cloudy sunshine and mild weather much longer. I hope to spend the following days with Ying’s mum, getting to know her better and learning from her experience of returning to her ancestral home country. I think her first shocks were the noisy roads, the building sites and the traffic. I hadn’t noticed that although there are white stripes at pedestrian crossings here, just like in other countries, cars never stop at them for pedestrians. I forgot how daunting the roads here are as a first encounter. Crossing one requires the following checklist:
Look left for bikes in bike lane, walk, notice the cars in the bike lane that you overlooked, look left for cars, walk carefully to central reservation – whilst simultaneously looking right and left for turning cars and bikes which ignore the general rules. You are halfway. Look right, but check left for turning vehicles, walk, squeal at the taxi which almost hit you from behind as the driver attempted a U-turn, perform hand gesture to said driver in a manner of your choosing, look left and right, walk, almost there – check right for bikes in bike lane, walk, and you’re there. That just about covers it.
