Day Two

Laura Kerr
Sep 2, 2018 · 3 min read
Tower blocks standing to attention in Jingzhou, Hubei Province

Day Two

Day two of Hubei Province and I’m a bit stressed. Yesterday was okay as I was so tired from not having much sleep on the flight and packing late the night before, that I didn’t care very much. The most stressful thing was buying household items like a kettle, plate and bowl, and cutlery which I would have brought from home if I’d known I had to buy it again over here. Today I went back to the supermarket for more supplies, which made me wish I’d learned more Chinese before I came. In some places, signs are in English as well as Chinese. Finding the right tea to buy, checking ingredients, asking for things in the supermarket and reading the menu in a noodle bar, although part of everyday life, are not things I had thought about before I came over here and these are things it would be very useful to know in Chinese.

I have found I can eat with chopsticks and use Chinese toilets, and I tried a bitter gourd which is indeed bitter and has a smoky taste. It is also known to have a lot of health benefits.

After ten years of living in Edinburgh and 10 months living in Tyne and Wear, the heat of Hubei Province is something I have to get used to. I have air conditioning in my bedroom so I am sleeping fine. This morning I got up before seven to meet my contact at the school I’ll be teaching at, Sally* and driver to go from Jingzhou to Yichang for the Chinese visa medical exam. The medical only took about half-an-hour; the drive in total took nearly four hours.

There are fields, rice paddies, rivers and old farmhouses on each side of the motorway on the way to Yichang. Yichang is on the Yangtze River and there are some really nice bridges that I was told I can’t walk over as they are only for vehicles and trains. On the other side of the river are steep, tree-covered hills. I will explore Yichang in future as it looks really nice except for the huge brown tower blocks which are also being built in Jingzhou as part of development along the Yangtze River Economic Belt. I find these tower blocks grim and foreboding, and also fascinating. Although this development echoes that of post-war UK with regards to tower block construction for living purposes, the tower blocks in the UK are smaller and there are not so many of them all in one space. The developments include shops, leisure facilities, fountains and trees. However they are being developed by businessmen and costing more than housing usually, or used to, cost. This echoes the UK’s current housing market which makes it difficult for people to buy if they are not earning a lot of money — too expensive for the average wage earner, and people in China who used to have accommodation provided by employers are now buying flats and borrowing money from the bank to do so — something that has been going on in the UK for years.

China is undergoing massive development and it’s interesting to be here for part of it, despite tasting the pollution in the back of my throat and the grim tower blocks looming over the inhabitants of the cities.

Brit in China

China observations and experiences & UK-China comparisons, from a China first-timer.

Laura Kerr

Written by

A blog about The Arts and a publication about China

Brit in China

China observations and experiences & UK-China comparisons, from a China first-timer.

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