travelling day three

This is the day I learned what a numbing pepper was.  It was hidden in my lunch at a Western Chinese cafe were we went after the weekly Sunday morning meeting.  There I was, chatting away, using chopsticks to deftly grab food from the middle of the table, meeting new friends from all over the world, trying all sorts of new food, giving the girls bits that were non spicy - and I bit into a numbing pepper.  It looks like a little clove, and causes your whole mouth to feel like it has had  a dose of very spicy anesthetic.

Tiny, bit powerful.

Like a food ninja.

Today we also let the girls ride bikes around the apartment complex in the afternoon and played a game of giant chess.  I lost miserably to Chris.

Tomorrow I am doing a storytelling workshop in the morning, and the afternoon promises mooncakes for the autumn festival.  Getting more culturally adjusted - I even crossed the road today more confidently.  It's warm but not too hot.

Quite liking China!

And now I can recognise the numbing peppers.

Chris' cultural tip: Look up, look crane.
You may have heard about China Inc. and how there is a construction and building boom in China.  But being here it is really in your face.  In our particular part of Wuhan (from which I am labelling all of China of course...) the skyline is dominated by cranes.  There are new high rise buildings in  various stages of construction wherever you look.  It is hard to imagine there is enough demand to fill all these new buildings, but they are still being built.  So as you look at the skyline it is not hard to multiply that out by the 1.3 billion people all over China and it is not hard to see this huge, resource-hungry beast that is modern China.  And it is not hard to imagine that all over the increasingly urban China it will be look up, look crane.