Monday Miscellany

I don't know if I've been busy physically this week, but I've sure felt brain busy. I have a couple interesting incidents to retell, but for now I'm just going with my weekly pictures. This time, however, they do have a theme:




Workers have been dredging the canal north of apartment. Much of the mud has been used to build these wattle and earth dams so they can drain a section of the canal, which is probably a step in the construction of the shopping center next door. The barge in the second photo has been plying the water for weeks. The engine looks like it is from the early Industrial Revolution, and the captain's wheel looks like something left over from the Opium Wars.


Construction workers building an apartment block that already looks old before it is even finished.

Several years ago, there was a book titled I'm OK, You're Not (the title was adapted from a warm fuzzy book in the '70s, I'm OK, You're OK). The point of the later book was that, when surveyed, many Americans said that neighborhoods were in decline, and schools were bad across America. However, the same people consistently said "but not my neighborhood, and not our schools". In other words, the problem was always somewhere else.

I find myself pondering that phenomena here, when I try to tell myself that our own apartment block is surely built better than all these other ones that I see under construction. I'm absolutely sure that this building won't come down in an earthquake.....




A work site north of Suzhou. Out of this endless pile of rocks, pairs of workers were moving them one by one by hand, with only a chain and a length of bamboo. In the second photo, I liked the little forest of tea jugs in the break area.