Things I Have Experienced and Seen Recently

• Teaching a company class on a Wednesday, one of the students managed to mention the Huawei woman. That is, the Chinese woman in Canada that the Americans are trying to extradite. The student said that this woman, whose name I can't be bothered to learn, is popular in China. Not in the mood to debate, I demurred on what the student said, except to make a Sergeant Schultz (from Hogan's Heroes) imitation.

• And I had to get a ride home from this student after class. On the ride after this class, she said to me that the Riots happening now in America could never take place in China. I pushed back against this, though I didn't bring up the cultural revolution and the riots that had happened in Xinjiang to name a few. I told her that if China had a hundred million blacks, there would be lots of rioting in China.

• On a Saturday morning, I saw a young woman get kicked off the bus because she didn't have a face mask. I first noticed the girl standing at the bus stop. She was cute and pretty. I felt guilty about noticing this and so I wasn't initially going to wait at the bus stop she was at, but then I saw the bus she was waiting for coming down the road. On a Saturday morning, I am in a bit of a hurry and so I take the first bus that is going in my general direction (on other days when I have more time, I take the 25 bus.), and so it was that I got on the same bus as this girl. I noticed she hadn't a mask when she boarded. I then saw the driver get her heck for this as she used her bus card to pay her fare. The girl seemed or was pretending (this is China!) to be surprised. She took a seat. The bus went down the road. The driver then slowed down and asked the girl about a mask. He then kicked her off the bus. She got off sullenly but without much protest. If I was on the ball, I thought afterwards, I could have given her one of the many masks I had with me. If I had had balls, I would have protested at the stupidity of the driver's actions. For there weren't that many people on the bus at the time. But it would have been too much of a hassle.

• It's monsoon season in Wuxi now (or the plum rains as the locals say) and so my drive to take Tony to school I saw four things worth mentioning:

1. I first saw very heavy rain. I had to keep the wipers on max speed as I drove. Being in the rain meant an instant soaking. It was that heavy.

2. I was making a right turn at an intersection, I have referred to a recent entry, where cars making U-turns can really block traffic. This time, there were no u-turners but there was all sorts of smashed metal crates and boxes and metal pieces strewn all over the road. I had to slow down so as to not take such a wide turn and thus avoid the debris. I immediately wondered how this pile of debris had come to be. But then I looked straight ahead and I saw a truck stopped, its four-way blinkers on, and with one of its doors not closed properly. I occasionally see loads falling off e-bikes and small three-wheel wagons, so it shouldn't be a surprise to see it happen to a truck.

3. From the debris pile, I had to drive to my wife's office building where she told there was a package for me to pick up in her office. To do this meant having to drive into an underground parking garage and park close to the elevator that would take me to Jenny's 16^th floor office. This went off without a hitch. What then I observed, was the amount of water that had collected near the parking garage exit gate. A pedestrian would have needed boots to get through it. Drainage is not something the local builders have dealt with very well thanks to their habit of constructing things hastily and in a slip-shod manner.

4. Driving to the intersection near my house, I saw a bus stopped in an unusual manner: It was stopped as it was in process of making a turn and had its hazard lights blinking. I wondered that was the delay. I drove closer and saw an e-bike lying on the ground in front of the bus. I drove still closer and saw an e-biker lying on the ground as well. I then knew what had happened: the bus was making a quick right and the e-biker was trying to get through the intersection. The collision was the result of the impatience of the local bus drivers and e-bikers. I reckon I have seen hundreds of these sort of vehicle-bike collision aftermaths in my time.

• The news of the cancellations of Gone with the Wind, and the German episode of Fawlty Towers caused me to download the movie and the series off the Internet. I showed my son Tony the German episode of Fawlty Towers and he laughed so much that now he wants to watch all the episodes of the series. [The actual part of the episode that caused it to be cancelled or withdrawn, were of these remarks made by a doddering old major character about East and West Indians that were absolutely hilarious. The Britain of these doddering old majors was a more civilized place than now, even with those "racist" observations.]

• I should be more insane than I am. I live in an environment where I endure pangs of social isolation and where there are no real opportunities for social interaction in which I can feel I am with kindred souls. I do keep myself busy best I can and thankfully, I have Tony & Jenny to keep me on the straight and narrow because I do have duties that I must perform. When I was younger, I did give into these feelings of loneliness in a big way, but I now look with contempt on my younger self for having done so. Still, in my older years, I act strangely sometimes. I will not talk to people who annoy me. I will strike many people as cold. But to be fair to myself, I'll say that dealing with others does involve me having to tolerate so much nonsense, that at a certain point I snap. And on a few occasions, I have lost my temper at people; but mostly I try to deal with them by giving them the silent treatment. Am I being solipsistic? I hope not, but I surely must be, since I write a blog. So, I can't deny it. In fact, I think I am with people who are in fact more solipsistic than I actually am. I also realize that there is nothing that these people can do for me, and it is immature to think they can. (I say this because currently there are only two other foreigners I see in Wuxi, and I don't talk to them much at all.) So, as you can see, I am only partially insane!

• The company has told us to avoid people from Beijing. Outbreak of the virus at some market there apparently.