Our new apartment has a pretty good view of the surrounding area. Here are a few of the typical scenes that can be seen from our 11th story porch (click the highlighted words for videos):
The frequent crossing of trains (Train Crossing):
A funeral procession (Funeral):
The grand opening of a new store in our community (New Convenience Store):
The school children across the street doing their daily collective dances (Dancing Students):
Of course, we can always see the air (something that you shouldn’t be able to see), thanks to trucks and smoke stacks nearby:
But there’s good news about our air quality: it has been raining for over a week, scrubbing some of the bad stuff out of the air. Tonight’s snapshot of the Kunming air quality (relative to surrounding cities) makes me glad to live here:
Unfortunately, the rain also brings cooler weather. It’s not such a big deal when the temperature drops to 49 in most places, but that means the indoor temperature also begins to fall (no central heating here):
Brrrr (ignore the date on our semi-functional thermometer)!
Brrrr…. I was thinking the other day about how nice it would be to come visit, so good to have that thermostat to trigger a memory! Can’t believe your new place still doesn’t have heat…
I thought the train picture was very interesting and very very un-orderly. There are no stripes or lane markings and when the train crossing arms come up everyone will move across and seemingly meet in the middle!
Thanks for the videos! I guess I still don’t understand why there’s no heat for y’all….must be a cultural thing. Do you have any kind of supplemental heat source, like a space heater thing to use or would that be too expensive or too polution-related, too? I know you’re getting used to wearing coats/jackets inside but I was just wondering…….K.
Although China has many more traffic rules than the US, the main (unwritten) rule seems to be “get ahead of the next guy.” Even if you’re in the wrong lane, get there first…
If you’ve never had central heating, I suppose that you don’t miss it, and many people leave their windows open year-round to get “healthy, fresh air” anyway. We have two space heaters which provide a small zone of warmth when sitting at the computer. We have some pretty heavy comforters and recently discovered the joy of preheating the bed with a hair dryer!
Ha! That’s creative! Makes me think of the colonial days when they’d heat bricks in their ovens and add them to the foot of the bed before retiring for the night. 🙂