Ningbo Postcards – Autumn edition
There’s nothing this country can do better than put on a big show. And similarly, there’s nothing it lacks more than to be able to create ‘atmosphere’. Restaurants, on the whole, consist of big square rooms that are usually fitted with huge big neon lights on the ceiling to scare away – well almost anything. Transactions of all sorts are, by and large, functional and even the weather in Ningbo switches from summer to winter and back to summer almost over night, leaving little room for the gradual change of nature that makes autumn and spring so attractive (like the smells of roasted chestnuts, decaying autumn leaves and the air getting colder). And so the notion of ‘atmosphere’, as we would know it in the West, is often entirely non-existent and lost on your average local person.
