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On St. Patty's day, we met fellow Travelbloggers
Splakawitz in Hangzhou through mutual friends. That weekend we had fun and have kept in contact and knew we wanted to go visit them in the neighboring province of Jiangsu. They just moved to China to teach English in February and are teaching at a Vocational College just like ours. So Friday afternoon, we set out to the train station to catch a high-speed train from Hangzhou to Changzhou. Zhou means city in Chinese so that is why so many cities have zhou at the end of it, especially in the
Yangtze River Delta.
The train ride was around 2 hours passing through one of the most populated regions on Earth. Per Wikipedia " The urban build-up in the area has given rise what may be the largest concentration of adjacent metropolitan areas in the world. It covers an area of 99600 km2 and is home to over 105 million people as of 2010, of which an estimated 80 million is urban." 105 million is a 1/3 of the US population.
Compare this to the region from Washington DC to Boston in the
US. "As of 2000, the region supported 49.6 million people, about 17%!o(MISSING)f the U.S.
population on less than 2%!o(MISSING)f the nation’s land area." Meaning the area we past through on the train ride is QUITE DENSELY populated with high rise residential towers growing from the ground up for as far as the eye can see, also the most cranes one could ever imagine. There is a joke that the construction crane is the only bird you will find in China, as they either kill them to eat or the birds are smart enough to stay away from the polluted skies of Eastern China.
We had little expectations for our trip to Changzhou, as Splakawitz had told us there were not many foreigners in the city, unlike Hangzhou. When we arrived to the main Changzhou train station we witnessed the new style of stations that are popping up all over China. We met Splakawitz and headed out to a Western Style meal at TGI Summers...yep a rip off of TGI Fridays. The food was great and then we hit up Dairy Queen (DQ) for a little dessert. We strolled through the city to see the
Grand Canal and the city's famous Comb Lane. Then we caught a cab back to their apartment on campus for a relaxing evening of chatting and drinking. For some reason I thought I was 21 again and we, mostly I, consumed the entire bottle of Absolut Raspberry Vodka that I bought while passing through Singapore's airport on our return from Bali. It made for a great evening but a rough Saturday morning.
We didn't really have any plans for Changzhou which was nice as we just went with the flow and strolled around the city. As you can tell from the photos there is lots of building going on similar to all parts of Eastern China. Then we saw the grim reality of buildings that are about 5-10 years old that are sitting vacant, ghost town ish. Supposedly there was a huge population shift around 10-15 years ago and people haven't moved back, yet there are residential high rises being built in all directions.
Interesting clip on China's development that I saw yesterday on
">YouTube.
We enjoyed our time away seeing a new city. Things I appreciated of Changzhou were:
• Looks on peoples faces when they saw 4 foreigners walking in the streets, it was more curiosity and pleasure than rudeness.
A woman who was over 70 yrs old, asked to take our photo in Hongmei Park and had the biggest grin on her face while showing us the photo. These are the moments I will miss about China. (