''Better City Better Life'': Shanghai !

Where I was,  not long ago,  it was the magnolia and the lotus season.

I saw the cherry blossom and plum festivals when I arrived in Shanghai in April.

The  beauty of the flowers and trees in parks and almost all around the city  seems to compensate for the extreme pollution which hardly allows the sky to be blue and the stars to shine at night.

Very often, the famous Pudong skyline appears like a succession of ghosts across the Huangpu.

My favourite spot is Suzhou Creek seen from Bus 123 or 55 on my way  back to Tongji, through the iron designs of the old Garden Bridge.

My favourite place to learn and gaze  endlessly at things of beauty is Shanghai Museum, entrance

 free, which makes it even more valuable.

My list of  'favourite....' could well be endless too as I stayed three months this time and wandered around by myself quite a lot.

when  I left, nearly two weeks  ago, it was clammy, rainy, over 30 ° night and day.

   It is poetically called the plum rain season, because the  daily rain makes the plums grow fast.

I strolled a lot, more than usual.

 It was my only possible occupation when I was out, as I cannot speak or read Chinese.

Now I am back  I cannot believe I put up  with such a situation for so long .

I have a long way to go if I want to grab some characters and try to practice speaking.

What is amazing is how willingly this huge population is  becoming an American-English speaking country, some more Chinglish than others, but it is more efficient than nothing  !

Almost once a week for some reason or another I was on the Bund, walking from the Ferry ticket office up to the tourist office past East Nanjing   road,  watching the traffic on the river, the barges heavy loaded with coal, sand or gravel, perhaps coming from up North from the Yellow Sea then going to some huge building  yards along the river.

 China is a huge building yard...

I travelled to Chengdu then to Changsha with the same visions of endless excavations made by roaring scrapers while cranes were loading iron  bars, like merry- go -rounds, through  the sky.

The whole province is busy building more towers, more elevated roads, more bridges, more underground lines, more blocks of flats, above all here,  for the growing population  in Shanghai which attracks young  Chinese white- collars as well as young unqualified folks from farming areas.

Shanghai is bustling with life night and day.

I have the feeling I am now in a desert land!

But the sky is blue and the tap water is  safe!

Still I miss my young Chinese friends so calm, so  generous of their own time, who helped me and accompanied me to charming Ancient Gardens in Suzhou, and even came with me to watch the Peony Pavillion one evening in a  riverside village, absolutely packed  at daytime.
 I knew, strangely enough, that I would miss the crowd, this diversity of people and sceneries, the sweetness of the children, always smiling at me, and ready to share their knowledge of English.

Because of an excess of hand luggage, at the last minute I had to leave my computer behind among other books and things. I am not able to deal with my photos on the Ipad. So I cannot post any illustration of my memories. One day, the missing photos will appear . Though I tried hard the delete function, I did not manage to clear the stupid icons from this text.

In winter, when time seems endless here, I will come back to this rather long Asian interlude in my life.
我愛中國的人