Thursday, March 25, 2010

Gratitude

Gratitude
It is awfully nice to have a wife who tells you your faults.  I couldn't live without her.

Groundskeepers
Rare readers may be familiar with this huge public square that is near the Kaulins Family apartment -- it has been the backdrop for many WTU videos.   Around the public square are these lawned areas.  Thursday morning on my way to work, I saw about fifty or so labourers working on the lawns -- they appeared to be plucking out weeds or something.  Whatever they were doing, they were a lot of them doing it.

Tearing up a little too often?
I was told of this Wuxi lawyer who had built a big new house on a mountain.  The Wuxi government decided that the new apartment had to be torn down to make way for a tunnel that they just decided was going through the mountain instead.  The lawyer was compensating for the property value -- however, he received nothing for the completed decoration work.  The person who was rich wasn't put out by it, but I imagine others would be.

But the story does confirm my suspicions that much of the construction work here is being done arbitrarily, without any regard to whether whatever already exists serves a purpose, or just had been recently built.  For instance, Nanchang Market is undergoing its second renovation since I have been here - as has Zhongshan Road.

A hope?
I hope I can win the arguments when I am right and that I lose the arguments where I am wrong.  Can you wish for this in a world where all is relative, and these is no absolute truth?

Tony sitting on my knee
My Saturday night was spent with Tony sitting on my knee as we watched a story telling animation on the computer.  Those are the moments you live for.  You can 't wait for a good future.  You have to grab the good moments while you can in this life.
 
China and the USA
I asked the students if they had about the U.S. healthcare reform, and they all told they had.  But they also wanted to talk about Google and the exchange rate.  Google leaving China they told me was not a big deal -- they would continue using Baidu.  They then said that the American concern about the exchange rate was a plot by the Americans.
 
Getting a ride home from a student, he told me that a dramatic change in the exchange rate would destroy his company.
 
Subway Workers
Most of the workers on Wuxi's subway construction project are migrant workers, the students told me.  One student then said that most Wuxiren were white-collar workers not diligent enough to do construction work.
 

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