Countdown to Chengdu (Courtney)

Today is our last day in xi'an, city of....well pretty much nothing really! Just another charmless city in a thousand others dotted around the country. We haven't got up to a whole lot over the last few days, except wander ceaselessly around town, get drenched repeatedly and struggle to find decent (or even edible) food. There have howevr been some highlights, namely the terracotta warriors (the shift buttons on this computer basically don't work so i'm just gong to give up using them...apologies for the decreasing lack of punctuation and grammar in these posts) which we both found pretty amazing, a trip to a muslim mosque in the muslim quater and some pretty decent japanese food including fun at the sushi train. but i think marcus might fill you in more on these as he is better with the history/details etc

i am going to write a bit about, well i suppose people here. the city is just teeming with peope. supposedly the city has a similar population to that of wuxi, but it certainly seems like the popluation is a lot denser here, or maybe just more concentrated in the city area. the streest are packed, not only with pedestians, but food stalls, beggars, scooters and bikes, dogs, rubbish, blarring store music and even the occassional catwalk fashion show - i'm not joking.

wht strikes me here is there is a much larger division between what we assume is middle class adn the absolute poor of the poor. thi is basiclaly a city of shopping malls and starbucks and they are packed to the brim with young, cashed up chinese. yet outside all of these places are beggars in record numbers, and these people have i think less than nothing. it can be hard in china to not be cynical at times, but here i am really feeling for the people out on the streets. in china my mood swings radically, often daily at the things we see and experience. i go from total frustration to hating everything to being intrigued and amazed and then being annoyed at myself.

there are so many social problems here, and how do you help? how can you even start? no amount of money would help the average person on the street and as we discussed last night, would anything help? would anything get these people out of the horrible situations they face or would it just be futile. would giving money help make their lives any different or would it just all somehow disappear and the same cycle continue? can anyone actually get out of these situations and somehow assimilate (and be accepted by others) back into a more normal life when they are so alienated.

As we walkedhome last night we saw three young girls in this main square area, they would have been about 6 -10 years of age. THey were soo dirty. kids here are often dirty as it is, but these girls we just filthy. I feel so much for them because they just should not be begging. i know that the kids can be used to draw the most sympathy but it is just so wrong. the parents should not be pushing their kids to do this, surely it doesn't teach the children anything, regardless of how desperate their situation is. obivously i can't understand their situation but it irks me so much to see children approaching people. i know that people always say you shouldnot give money but you should give food but that is hard to do. we had this little girl follow us for quite a bit, there are times when we give money and times when we dont. there is no criteria for this, it's just random and you cant feel bad for thoseyou dont give money to, because if we gave to every person wesaw on the streets we'd be begging too by the end of the day. i gave this girl a note but i know that whatever we could give her wont help her. she needs food and clothes and most importantly she needs education, but she will be lucky to get a bit of food out of any of hte food her parents are given. i so wish there was a way i could just give her the money, just for her. or better yet buy her something, even somthing basic like an icecream that only she could enjoy. walking away from these kids just makes you feel enormously helpless.

Further along the road was an elderly man lying on the pavement,seemingly with part of his intestines hanging out of his stomach. how do we know if this is real or a scam? there was another man standing over him collecting money. there is just so much need.

then there are the oldies who collect rubbish. people all over the country do this. we see these impossibly old men and women struggling with the weight of the paper and plastic bottles they collect, at all hours of the day and in all weather. the rubbish they collect can then be sold on. we sometimes here that some of these people actually make a reasonable living out of doing this, but money aside,what kind of living is this? we're not talking 40 year olds here,these are people in their 70s still trying to survive with no one to look after them.

I know that these things happen all over the world and also in our own country, i suppose we just dont see it in australia as openly or on such scale. in a country that has such a huge population i can't see how there would ever be at ime where there was not such enormous poverty and need.

And now a couple of random things...

i've decided that a city here can be judged by its taxi flagfall rate. yes, i've givent his a lot of thought! Wuxi's taxi flagfall is 8 yuan, think it was the same in suzhou. Beijing and shanghai were each 10 yuan. Xian...6 yuan. i think this can say a lot about the city on a whole! furtherto this the traffic is NUTS!!! Sheer chaos on the roads here, and we have added quite a number to our tally of road accidents that we have seen.

something i have been meaning to mention for ages is how takeaway soup and noodles are generally packaged here - in bags! it cracks me up everytime, seeing someone walking down the street with a plastic bag of soup. strangely i've never seen anyone covered in the remnants of a burst bag.

LAst night as we walked home, we made our way along a makeshift market. obviously all of these people were sellign illegally, as suddenly there was a cry in the crowd (assume something like "police!") and they all started running! Now this would be funny enough, but it was made all the funnier by the fact these people weren't really "mobile". i've seen this in europe too, where people grab up their stock and are off. but here, people have things laid out on tables and best of all on wheeled racks. so suddenly the square was this chaotic motion of people rolling racks everywhere! Frantically grabbed for the camera to try and capture it but it was a false alarm so by the time i was ready to shoot they were all back to selling.

And lastly, kids and split pants. i'm amazed by the volume of bare bums i've seen in this town! it seems like no kids wear nappies. now, clearly i'v enever tried to toilet train a child, but i imagine it to be a tricky and messy process. so how do they get by with babies with no nappies??? how are parents and grandparents not constantly covered in pee and poop? it really amazes me because you see so many parents on the street with their child folded up, bum over the gutter waiting for the child to go. the kids are way too young to be able to say they need to go, or even be aware that they need to go. but obviously they have some sort of system and it seems to work!! So naomi and adrian, i know i sent you those pants as a joke, but maybe you should get mahahlia into them! save yourself a whole lot of nappy changing....

And on that note, see you in chengdu...land of pandas, tea and hot pot!