Like I’ve said before, my first trip back was just incredibly disorienting, since everything was so new and different to me. Aside from the language issue which I touched on in the last post, my surroundings in China were also very very different from what I was used to in the United States. The streets were a lot dirtier, and it was pretty obvious that not littering and taking care of them was not a priority at all. The living conditions for most of the family friends that we visited ranged from relatively nice apartments to some chairs and furniture in single concrete room. In some of the dirtier alleys and “living areas,” people often urinated in the streets and just let it run wherever. This was because, back when I was five, some places didn’t have plumbing or outhouses, and so many people resorted to using pots or going in the street. These small back alleys often smelled due to how often people used them, and it seemed that no area was off limits as long as it wasn’t in public view. The interesting thing is, the last time I returned to visit Shanghai four years ago, I noticed that it had been cleaned up a lot, and that it reminded me a lot more of a large American city and not the dirty alleys that I remembered from ten years before. I had heard that China was industrializing and modernizing incredibly quickly, especially in large economic centers such as Shanghai, but it was amazing to see the huge difference with my own eyes.
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