With the weather finally having changed from permanent horizontal rain with snow to a lovely 25’C and sunny, I took a short walk around the area just outside campus.
Since coming here just over two years ago, high rise buildings have shot up all around the area like mushrooms, the skyline is littered with cranes and building sites make up much of the scenery. In amongst all this, resilient residents and farmers who’s land this must have been before the heavy machinery moved in, still try and hold on to little plots of land. And so, whilst wandering along the streets and peeking behind graffitied walls, we found a huge big vegetable patch, cultivated by a hand full of farm folk. I just like the way the picture ‘hopefully’ conveys the juxtaposition between old rural China and the new ‘hyper reality’ China. And one must wonder how the new is sustained, once it fully pushes aside and eradicates the old and completely covers the land in skyscrapers …
A few blocks down and we spotted a temple along a riverside. Actually, the temple is just another Chinese temple and not really that exciting, but again, it shows how the traditional is slowly being surrounded by the fast growing, modernised China that is steadily shaping much of the scenery. Not surprising then that this place is full of contradictions, mismatch and contrasts.
One Response to “A trip around Ningbo”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Next time 100 postings…..chapeau