The Little Things

          Hello again. Yet another beautiful day in Shenyang China. My wonderful husband, Jonathan seems to have covered quite a bit of our time here so far, therefore I'm going to concentrate on a few interesting details. This past week has been packed full of first impressions and I intend to break these preconceived notions we had developed before coming here... and maybe confirm a few.
          So first I want to mention how glorious it is here. The weather is not always humid, though it is quite hot in the middle of the day, it is definitely tolerable. On our first day in China it rained in the morning! Not cold rain, but hot rain. The rain and clouds of course made it humid, but that was the most humid it has been. In regards to smog we have not seen too many smoggy days, or people with masks on. Of course it has only been a week so we can expect a lot of changes with the atmosphere later.
Now that we are through with the general small talk of weather.....
          There are 8 million people living in Shinyang, that is about the same amount as in New York. When we arrived I expected to be crowded by a lot of "short" people. This is a slightly raciest assumption that they would all be short,of course, I'm sorry. Yet we were not crowded, there is plenty of room to walk around, and in fact most men our age are around my height. The woman are more likly 5'6" or a little shorter. Of course there are the generations before our own that are much smaller here as well. The only time we feel confined is in an elevator or the subway (duh).... or the lines. Funny thing about lines, they tend to clump here, and people cut all the time. This is a normal thing we are still getting use to.
          The other thing we are still getting use to is the driving! Of course we heard the stories and had come to expect it... experiencing it is a different matter. Lines are also just suggestions in this case as well, and pushing into small spaces is an every moment occurrence. Its a good thing they drive at a slower pace or the accidents would be horrific. There also tends to be a lot of honking, I mean laying on your horn when a little grandma is walking too slow in front of you honking. It's not road rage either. Everyone just calmly cuts in front of people and honkes there horn.
          But this is really the only major noise you hear! In fact the chattiness is kept quite polite and low. We also hear a lot of construction in our area because we live in a fairly new area  The New Hunnan district. I can see three different high rise apartment being constructed out our back window. I actually expected it to be a lot louder, and a lot more dirty here. Glad that these things are not true.
          The last thing I wanted to touch on..... With the number of people living here and the bad reputation that Chinese people are a littering people, I expected the streets to be filthy. Maybe I was talking it up too much in my head. Probably psyching myself out to expect the worst. Fact is it's very clean here, and there are trees and parks everywhere! In fact its cleaner then the bay area, the only other metropolitan type area I've really lived in. People do seem to litter, babies and animals are allowed to "go" in the street, yet I haven't seen hardly anything icky. I haven't even seen people picking it up! My guess is they have hired ninjas for clean up duty. I mean that would explain the mystery right?
          So I will leave it at that, I'm sure there are a lot of other small details I could mention but for now lets leave it at the clean up ninjas.
Lots of love to those who follow.

Ps. The yellow and red things are work out machines for anyone to use in our court yard.... and people do use them every evening. In fact it seems like everyone is out socializing and exercising the full hour before the sun goes down. Kind of neat!