The night is alive

These large and noisy dump trucks rumbled past our bedroom
windows for several weeks as rubble from old apartments was
hauled away between 9 PM and 6 AM

Last night Ann and I were guest lecturers at the University Culture Series out on the new campus. We talked about freedoms in America and the criminal justice system. We wove in Ann’s experience serving on a jury for a murder trial some years ago. 

A few of the trucks I took pictures (bad ones) out the window of the taxi

last night

While not exactly spellbinding, and even putting some of the audience to sleep, we did generate a lot of questions. Gun control, race relations, bias, OJ Simpson, guilty people going free, rich people having more access to good attorneys, various specific freedoms, etc. 

They always want comparisons. Interesting challenge given diplomatic considerations and limitations on free speech. 

It cracked me up when one of the women asked “You know that we also have "freedom of speech" in China. But what are you exactly free to say in America?"

What interested us most about the evening was not the lecture but the ride home and seeing how alive the night was. Generally at night we are closer to home. Here we were at the new campus, about 20 miles from our apartment.

The drive home was a dusty, air polluted crowd of construction vehicles and traffic. Cement trucks, full grown trees a foot+ in diameter and 25’+ feet tall being lifted out of the ground and loaded on trucks, long flatbed trucks loaded with every describable construction material, big dump trucks full of dirt and rubble and huge dump trucks full of the same. And on and on.

Xi’an has a very serious air pollution problem. We heard that the BYU couple two years before us in our apartment came back for a 2^nd year but to a different city because of health concerns. 

Two weeks ago we were outside when an amazing sand storm hit from the Gobi (Jenny sent us a news article about it just having hit California). We have many beautiful sunny days here but many where air pollution is off the charts. The newspaper says construction is responsible for it.

Last night we experienced this construction pollution in a new way. 15-20’ in the air was a sandy haze. Higher it was still hazy. But closer to the ground, it was construction dirt and dust blowing around everywhere. So glad we were not on a bike or motorcycle.

The construction traffic was also memorable in another way. Traffic in Xi’an is always crazy. But this brought it to a new height. The traffic lights were still functioning but none of these  trucks stopped or even slowed down. Many of the trucks do not even use headlights.  They look mean and drive like they own the road, which, in a way, they do. I cannot adequately describe what we were seeing. 

This is China and the scale of everything is so much larger than “life.” Ann and I have built a couple of homes in newly developed areas. We have been very aware of the construction, especially excavation vehicles that have accompanied it. We likely matched our lifetime viewing of constructions vehicles all in one night. But the vehicles were so much larger. It was like taking dozens of the biggest vehicles from Bingham Copper mines in Utah and put them on local streets. Thank heavens they are not allowed in the city dring daylight hours.