it's cold in north China!

The recent holiday down South mostly involved either grotty white-tiled towns where you really don't want to stay very long or really cool old villages with all the buildings made out of wood, or stone. Currently I am North of Shaanxi.. which means in the middle from left-right and at the top, from top-bottom. So, very close to Mongolia -which is where Plan works. The villages here are very poor since they are so far from the sea (no trade), have very little water and desertification makes it hard to grow many crops.

What this area does have is plenty of mud, sand and the like -including coal. Thus there are some wealthy people (who own the coal mines, and drive in Audis), but not very many! There are, though, lots and lots of bricks.. If only bricks were something that could be exported! It means that the buildings look quite nice, though all the same colour! Normally the landscape might be quite dull, except in the winter when it's minus 5 in the daytime, and minus 20 at night... hence though it only snows once all winter, the snow stays for months (and it stays white, unlike polluted Beijing snow that turns black quickly!).

So everything is quite pretty. Toursit-wise, there is some Great Wall to see (though mostly it is just lying in ruins, or covered in mud -several feet of mud, from looking at some bits that are being 'restored'/dug-out). The capital of this county (Yulin, population of a few million i suppose) is a strange place. The old town is inside some old city walls (mostly collapsed, but parts restored); 2 streets inside the old town have changed: 1 is full of neon and shops; the other is full of pagodas every 400 metres and nicely styled chinese buildings (also shops). Everything else is run-down brick places. Then there is the newer parts outside the city wall with fancy new streetlights, paved communal areas, hotels (no idea who uses them though) and a couple of tall office buildings. Plus a 1,000 year old pagoda.

What is cool about the pagoda is that it has 4 windows on each level. Look out of 3 of them and you see brown, brick buildings, ruined city wall and some motorbikes/horse-cart traders. Look out of the 4th and you see the neon, the hotels, the restored city wall, the Audis and buses racing by. You get the idea -quite a contrast. Everything in China is a contrast! I have endless photos of going to places where fancy apartment buildings are being built on the right. In the middle is the remains of something -and on the left is the Chinese equivalent of a slum.

Except in China, there are no really bad slums compared to other countries (thanks to the government limiting migration to some extent; since you can only claim 'benefits' in the city you are registered with -which leads to massive problems for the 200million migrant workers who cannot get healthcare, send their children to normal schools etc for free). Just run down houses, litter everywhere (the resident's fault of course) and awful sanitation conditions (shared toilet blocks).

Tomorrow i'm being shown around some of the villages we are working in (we don't work in the towns) including the projects we are doing, and I will spend the night in a yao dong, which is cave house -where people here live. Should be interesting (I have seen one before, but not stayed in one).

The good news is that, despite staying in a hotel alone, I did NOT get a call on the room phone from a prostitute (yet)... and the guy next to me in the internet cafe stopped smoking. Having said that no-one in the internet cafe is actually on the internet. Every person (guarenteed -and there are more than 400 people in this one) is playing games (and maybe using QQ -like MSN Messenger). They should change the name of these places!

There is an ongoing debate about how much of a threat China is to the World (economically). Some argue a big threat: endless cheap labour, great infrastructure, endless supplies of cheap coal, huge investment and technology transfer from foreign companies etc.. Others say the threat is over-rated: too many internal social issues, environmental issues, endemic corruption (related to the autocratic political system), lack of innovation, dominance of inefficient state owned companies etc.

I say -look at the young people. If all their spare time is spent on computer games.. there is your answer....