The never ending adventures of a Canadian who lives in Wuxi and Jiangyin, China with his Chinese wife Jenny and their son Anthony aka Tony
Or at least the area around my Jiangyin apartment.
I noticed the narrowness when I was driving around with my wife & son the past Saturday.
I found it made driving annoying because oncoming cars caused me to have to slow down.
Commenting on this to my wife, she said that Jiangyin was a small city and so had narrow roads.
An apartment community in the Xi Shan district apparently had all its residents bused away to a quarantine facility. My wife showed me a photo of buses parked outside the complex. The community was near my Xi Shan apartment community, and we had actually looked at apartments in that complex during the Summer 2021 apartment search.
Evidently, the Covid outbreak there was very serious,
There is a Lian Zhou Noodle Restaurant that is a fifteen minutes’ walk from my Jiangyin apartment. I had this plate of chopped and fried noodles for the first time since 2021 when I was working in downtown Wuxi.
Yummy!
Went for a walk after my first day at my new school. Here’s what I saw:
Nice.
Here is my classroom:
Needs some neatening and cleaning.
In the area of the Xizhuang in Wuxi, China on the Hui Shan Big Road has stood a mall that had never opened.
Never opened it is till now. Apparently it is an outlet mall now.
Whatever the mall’s name it had been a curious site for any expatriate who chanced to pass it on a regular basis. They would tell other expatiates about it: this mall that had never opened…
That is a label I would like to apply to myself. I’ve just come upon the term in this article.
I had been describing myself as a wannabe Catholic Reactionary, or at least sympathetic to them.
Tory Bohemian are into art in a big way. What artistic contributions could I make? Poetry or video?
Ate at a small restaurant in Jiangyin. It was about three kilometers from my Jiangyin apartment. The next day that area was locked down.
Went to the apartment to get the Wifi installed. When we drove back to Wuxi, we saw barriers blocking the area we had been to eat.
This morning, I learned on my school teachers WeChat group that the Jiangyin apartment community was under a soft lockdown. Residents could leave for only two hours to do grocery shopping.
My wife says this lockdown will only be for two days. I can only hope. Most of my stuff, like clothes, is in Jiangyin. And I do want to get settled in my apartment before I start work.
My wife Jenny got news that they found a Covid case in Jiangyin and some communities had been locked down. Not the community where my apartment is. However, it may end up happening.
I am in Hui Shan now (Tuesday). The plan was to go to Jiangyin tomorrow and get Wifi installed in the apartment. That may not happen because of the lockdowns.
Most of my stuff is in Jiangyin including most of my clothes.
I don't need this….
How to describe my reaction to news that Salman Rushdie had been attacked and seriously injured by a Muslim attacker? That it happened was logical I felt. Rushdie had a Fatwa on him after all. That it happened was in keeping with the spirit of Clown World I thought as well. I mean by the latter thought that it was a unbelievably stupid security breach. I bet the place where the attack happened was more worried by silly Covid protocols than real security concerns. The place was also probably more concerned with diversity concerns than security as well.
The attack brought back two memories in my life. One was from Winnipeg; the other was from Wuxi.
I was attending the University of Winnipeg when the fatwa was issued against Rushdie. The school had a speaker from Iran who tried to explain the Fatwa, and justify it. The speaker was torn to shreds by a professor in attendance who explained what Rushdie’s intentions were in writing the novel Satanic Verses.
In Wuxi, my old school hired a Muslim who said he was from New Jersey. He was very observant of his religion and was always looking for a spot to pray. His English was horrible however and the other staff thought his story was dodgy. One thought he had a fake passport.
The enforcement of Covid procedures has relaxed these days in my part of China. I have been getting less hassle from gatekeepers.
Every big place one has to enter, whether it be a shopping or residential complex, one has to show QR code to a person minding the entrance. To produce the needed code, one has to open a health app on a smart phone, and use the app’s scanning feature to scan a QR code that is posted near the entrance. And some of the entrance staff have a sign in hand which has the code that needs to be scanned.
One time last week, I was coming back to the Hui Shan apartment complex, and saw a security guard sitting and holding the QR code sign. I brought out my old IPhone 6 and started to set it up for the guard. The setting up involves putting on the 4G and finding the app. It’s an annoying process because the phone is slow. Last week though, the slowness allowed me to notice that the guard was asleep. So I blew past him.
I have since done this all the time whether the guard is asleep or not. I have even done this when driving into places. Never once have they chased me,
With the temperature hitting 40 C or 100 F, there isn’t much that I want to do. I’m staying in a cool apartment and reading.
Maybe I’ll go to Metro to buy some tea and butter.
Maybe I’ll go to Jiangyin to check out the apartment I’m renting there.
I am out of the Xishan Longfor apartment, finally, after going through the longest and most annoying move of my life. I have two abodes now: the apartment my wife owns in Hui Shan and the apartment I’m renting in Jiangyin.
The move was complicated because I had to move stuff to three places: Jiangyin, Hui Shan and my wife’s office; and because there was so much stuff to move. I made, I reckon, a hundred trips hauling stuff from the 19th floor to the car. On the last day in the Xishan apartment, I had to make an extra trip to Hui Shan because there was still so much of our stuff left to move!
And now we have to organize the stuff we have moved. There are lot of unpacked boxes in the three locations.
