Sorry about the late report of Sichuan Province. You can not expect too much from three days interview especially when these interviews were arranged already. we spent most of the time in the bus and officials’ offices, there was just little time left for us to see Chengdu people in real life.
we got very rainy day as well as very sunny days here. I have to say that it makes Chengdu even more unidentified with other big cities, since Chengdu has long been famous for lacking of sunshine. There is even an idiom which goes “Sichuan dogs would even bark at the sun”, which means the dogs seldom saw the sun so they would regard the sun as a monster or something. Now, even the sun would come out so often.
Obviously the life in Chengdu has already been back to normal. Every time when we tried to have dinner, we had to circle around the city for a long time since every restaurant had already packed. If you like spicy food, you have to come here. You will be greatly impressed and surprised about how delicately they cook the food with just peppers and Chinese prickly ash and make the pleasant flavor linger in your mouth and mind for such a long time. And Believe me, you cannot get real Sichuan food in any other places. You must come here. Our driver told me at one dinner that if Sichuan people go to some other places, the first thing when they come back, no matter how late or tired, is heading directly to a local restaurant.
Another pleasant memory of Chengdu is the real and natural smiles of local people. After you see a lot of fake smiles in Beijing and Shanghai, you will treasure the real smiles a lot. People here speak in a relatively low voice with mild smiles, making you feel life is as delicious as the food, especially when you know a salary of 1,000 RMB per month is quite enough to manage a very comfortable life here.
I felt an aftershock which lasted for ten seconds on my last night in Chengdu. The flowers on my table kept shaking slightly. I could obscurely hear dogs barking outside. But the intensity is far from making people feel nervous and scared. In the morning, I heard local people say “it is just an aftershock and we are quite used to that”. When you take the easy life here for granted, from time to time it will show you something quite unusual. After several years, how would the people here recall and comment on the 5.12 earthquake?
Now i am again in Beijing, China’s political center (what a humiliation to be called as the political center of China) and cultural center (what a humiliation for the culture to boom in a political center). With the approaching of Olympics, life turns out to be very hard here. With so many restrictions on delivery goods, more and more things are disappearing in the supermarket and everywhere.One of my friends just bought a new appartment and wants to decorate it, but most of the things he ordered, including sofa and bed, cannot be delivered till the end of Paralympics, so he has to stay in the appartment he rents for another two months. Some snack stands and fruit stands just disappeared in order to make the street look more tidy and clean, making people have to go to the supermaket waiting in the long queue for just some pears or apples. The worst thing, i think, is that some medicine store even runs out of some very common medicine, for example, the medicine for cold. Maybe that is because cold is not urgent at all, at least cold can not kill a person within two months. So if you’ve got a cold, just suffer it.
Olympic has never been a game for everybody, especially in the host city.
