Goodale Family Musings: Good Exercise, Bad Intentions in Wuxi

Friday afternoon this past week I flew from Chongqing to Wuxi in China, where I was a guest presenter at the 2008 Wuxi International Digital Arts Forum on Saturday. Before the opening reception dinner Friday night, I had about three hours of free time, so I took a nice, exercising walk. I hadn't intended to walk almost three hours, but I HAD HAD ENOUGH!!! I needed some western food!!! The hotel room service menu didn't even have anything western on the menu, so truth be told, I went walking with the bad intention of finding an unhealthy burger, pizza, or ANYTHING western!!!

My guess is that I walked probably five miles that afternoon, sort of in a large figure-eight pattern of the city. What did I get for my troubles? Pretty much muddy shoes and pants, and no western food. To one side of my hotel, I soon discovered that I had walked in to a construction city. That's right... not a "construction zone," but a construction city. Block after block after block of huge high-rises (they looked like apartments) under construction. Though it wasn't raining at the time, it had rained earlier in the day, and walking through a construction zone, my pants and shoes got pretty muddy! Enjoy the construction shot to the right, of two of probably 50 high-rises-under-construction that I passed on my walk.

But no western food!!! In three hours and five-miles-or-so of walking, I never found any western food. In fact, I never ran across another foreigner. All I seemed to earn were curious stares from nearly everybody I passed. I guess foreigners like me are pretty rare at least in the part of Wuxi my hotel was in. Which is kind of surprising; my guess is that Wuxi is only about 80 or so miles west of Shanghai, where there are foreigners and western food at every turn.

So I type this posting on my flight from Shanghai to Tokyo, where I CANNOT WAIT to fix myself some western food in my apartment!!! :-)

A cute little park on the grounds of my hotel.

From that park on the grounds of my hotel.

Check out the window cleaners on my hotel. You may have to click on this picture to enlarge it to see, but there's a dewd at on the roof of the hotel, a rope extending from him (I'm SURE he's not the only thing holding the rope), and a dewd at the end of that rope getting close to the ground. The dewd on the end of the rope is just sitting on a small board, like a 2 x 6, tied to that rope. Not a job I would want!!!