I Should Have Taken a Picture; Protests! Yes!; My Favorite Blogger Says; Back to Work in May?; I Contain Solitudes; A Trip to the Livat Mall;

• On a Thursday just past, I went to downtown Wuxi to pick my passport. The visa had to be renewed. On the way, I walked pass the Xin Kai Hu Xiao Xue apartments which I had lived in many years ago when I first came to Wuxi. I saw that, to accommodate the virus crisis lockdown, a new and bigger gate had be put up at the entrance. As well, I saw that they had put up two five star PRC flags. I should have taken a photo of this because what I was beholding was iconic and symbolic of all that has taken place the last three months.

• I am glad to see that some Americans are protesting the lockdowns in their country. (And some Germans are too, in theirs)

• My favorite blogger wrote another entry about the PRC. He thinks that its politburo has been making many, many mistakes lately, and the world will hopefully not put up with it anymore. We'll have to see. If my Chinese wife is anything to go by, they have an irateness coming from their instinctual need to save face, and many will be intimidated.

• Latest rumor, I heard, is that our school will open after the May holiday. I had hoped that I would go to work now that my son Tony has gone back to school, but the lower primary grade and kindergarten students have not gone back yet. Training centers, like the one I work at, will be the last to be allowed to re-open.

• Bob Dylan just released a song called I Contain Multitudes. It has inspired me to start a poem called I Contain Solitudes. It is and will be a work in progress and I will publish it over and over again. until I get sick of trying to improve it.

• Saturday, my wife Jenny wanted all three of us to go out. So we went to the Hui Ju (Livat) Mall, the biggest mall in Wuxi. On the drive there, we had to go through the area where, in the before times, there had been an overpass. It took us forty minutes to get through it, when with a fully functioning overpass, it would have taken but thirty seconds. The congestion took place at an area where five lanes of traffic, of vehicles of all sizes, had to merge into two lanes. So, our little Citroën was stuck behind and between some long flat-decks and trailers. But at least we didn't have trouble getting a parking spot at the Mall. For a Saturday, it wasn't very busy. We stayed in the Mall enough to look around, become bored, get some sandwiches at Subway, and buy frozen hot dogs at Ikea. In the Mall, everyone was wearing masks and the atmosphere was subdued.