Instant walls and gated communities

Basketball courts and small buildings a couple of weeks ago. No wall along the street.

Same street with different view. And of course, the buildings 

are gone and the courts are to the right, behind the wall.

One fascinating part of construction  are the walls, especially the new "instant" walls.

It feels like almost everything in China is a "gated community."

We have wondered if this is a relic of a more severe police state. It is easy to control the comings and goings of people when thousands of them only have a couple of checkpoints they can pass through.

Take our campus. Very typical. It is surrounded by a 7-8’ cement wall. There are only three openings – gates. They are manned 24/7. Even for walkers, these 3 gates are the only way in or out of campus.

They just mortared over the brick all around
the basketball court

 

The basketball courts have been scrapped
away. who knows what is next

Last night, leaving the old campus to go to the new campus, we walked by the basketball courts where a construction crew was putting up a new brick wall.

Ann had seen them tearing down a couple of old small buildings on the edge of the site the week before. Most of  the area was filled with  basketball courts, badminton courts, and a big area where dance exercise goes on.

And now it is walled in.

Today the basketball courts have been removed. We wonder what is going on.

Seeing these walls suddenly pop up anywhere and everywhere is always interesting and always raises lots of questions we never get answered. China. And amazing construction.

Today they are assembling the crane to
start constructing the High School addition
on the front of our campus

Sunday night we were walking around the campus and discovered a fresh plaster wall essentially slicing off the back several blocks of the campus.

The old apartments have been razed over the last several weeks. Now that the rubble is gone, there is a fresh wall to keep everyone out during the construction of the new apartments.

As we ride the bus to the new campus we notice almost everything except commercial areas is either behind neighborhood walls or else there is a new wall protecting a new construction site.

 

Some of these walls are mortar or brick; others are gigantic billboards. The billboards are really funny. Many are artist renderings of the new apartment community.

 

Ann saw advertising the building of the Mall of America with a picture of the rotunda. They are full of creative attempts to use English to create a marketing cachet for "Vivid Living" "Colorful Living" and other phrases that make no sense to us.



The new wall surrounding the recently
demolished apartments on the north of campus



Truck access to inside walled area of
recently demolished apartments



Typical random wall



Typical construction wall. New waterpark
being built here.





Typical random wall





Typical construction wall

Typical construction wall. This
 is down the middle of a main street where they started construction a new subway line in Xian





More of the subway construction  wall





Wall around Wild Goose Pagoda

Typical random wall



 



Typical random wall

The construction crane

[The last picture here is of the 700 mountains being leveled. The other photos are just of various construction projects in our neighborhood.]

In 2005, when we were tourists in China, we heard that the construction crane was the Chinese "national bird". We were impressed then and crane numbers have only multiplied since. The construction around Xi’an  verges on the unbelievable. This is a city with a population of 8 million people. We are only acquainted with a small part of it. What we have seen amazes us.

We have seen 6-8 major “Ridgedale type” malls that have opened in the last year or so. In our area of circulation through the city, we are watching construction of perhaps 2 dozen major projects and countless minor ones. Let me try to describe what we see when we are driving by a new project.

Most of the new major projects around here are 15-30 story buildings. No super tall 60-100 stories like the really big cities. Everything seems about the same height.  In Minneapolis a 30 story building is a pretty big deal and most projects in Minneapolis of 30 stories would be one building. Definitely not here.

The typical new project seem to be 8-15 buildings of 15-30 stories. Most of the projects are anchored by a new multi-story high end mall built at their base (including lots of restaurants and lots of high end western brand stores). (You cannot have all those people moving in to live and work there without shops, restaurants, entertainment, etc.) When a developer starts to build, he really starts to build. The first building to open in the development seems to be the bank that is financing the project. It will provide financing to buy all the apartments (we would call them condos), and functions as a sales office as well.

When we talk about 8-15 buildings, we don’t mean build one, finish it, start another, finish it, start another. When a development starts here, acres of old buildings are torn down, and all the new buildings start rising at the same time. Suddenly you have all these buildings rising up with their cranes sitting on top as they deliver all the construction materials.

In our little corner of Xi’an all these major projects, and countless "minor" ones of just a few buildings, amaze us.

Here are a couple of interesting related articles. The first is about Samsung starting to build a $7 billion factory in Xi'an. They are working with our university to specifically train engineering students for Samsung's needs. When is the last time a new company moved to Minneapolis and spent $7 billion? And this is going on all over China. http://www.china.org.cn/business/2012-09/13/content_26512600.htm

The other article is about China building new cities. It is obviously fraught with problems. China projects having 220 cities of over a million inhabitants within 12 years. That compares with 35 cities of that size in Europe  This particular article talks about a developer being hired by the government to level 700 low-level mountains to create a flat, buildable city footprint. China. Amazing.

Hard to put your head around what you need to do with a population of 1.4 billion, growing by 40 million a year, and still trying to get hundreds of millions out of poverty.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/02/02/china-mountain-flattening/1881505/

Ann says

1.       Boiled water is my friend

2.       75 steps are not impossible (even several times a day)

3.       Long periods of desk work drive me to distraction

4.       I can buy things at a foreign grocery store alone and I can use the post office alone

5.       It is possible to communicate even if each of you do not speak each other’s language

6.       Do not forget your keys or thumb drive

7.       There are kind people everywhere who are willing to help you

8.       I have a brand new respect for the organizational abilities of teachers


9.       There is always a new day if you can just get through the present one

10. I do not have to do it alone.

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.

How does this happen – Dan & Heather Chard

What a great surprise to find Dan Chard and his lovely daughter Heather walking into our “chapel” this past Sunday in Xi’an. 

Dan & Alyson were in the ward back in the early 90’s. Heather was born in Minneapolis. What a small world and what a fun short visit with them. 

Dan’s LinkedIn entry says he is President, Global Sales and Operations, Nu Skin. He and Heather were doing a “senior trip” prior to some meetings in Beijing. We enjoyed having them stop over Monday, showing them our apartment and then taking them out to dinner. We need more of you doing the same thing!

Jenny & Mary in Xi’an

The Great Wall of China

The girls just took 2 weeks’ vacation in China, Beijing, Xi’an, and Hong Kong. We had 6 fun days with them while they were in Xi’an. We think they really enjoyed it. 

We plain old enjoyed their company, enjoyed showing them a city we have come to love, and enjoyed them having many “authentic” Chinese experiences to understand a little better what life is like for us.

Take for example the night construction knocked out our gas. It took several days to get restored and that meant either no showers or icy showers for several days. Ah, welcome to China dear daughters… Always something. 

On top of the Xi'an city wall at night (9 miles perimeter)

Here are a few of the favorite things we did together: Terracotta Warriors, Jingdi Tombs (miniature Terracotta Warriors from the next emperor of China (150 BC); since he did not know his predecessor made the earlier discovered life-size ones, he chose to make 50,000 1/3 size ones), Hua Shan Mountain, Wild Goose Pagoda, City Wall, Muslim Quarter and more.

Enjoy the pictures. Notice poor Mary’s broken foot. Luckily at the Great Wall she rode a gondola up and an alpine slide down. Here in Xi’an, her fit-bit was measuring 7-10 miles a day – much of it on stairs including the five floors up to our elevator-less apartment. We do walk a lot.

Hot Springs near Terracotta Warriors

Terracotta Warriors (210 BC); excavation started 1974

Jingdi Tombs 150 BC

Wild Goose Pagoda

The center strip between the two lanes of traffic south of the Pagoda

Hua Shan Peak 

A visit from Ann's sister

We had the wonderful pleasure of the company of Ann's sister and her husband, Marilyn & Paul Woodland from Logan. We went up to Beijing for a couple of days of touring with them.

Then we all came down to Xi'an where we worked in some very enjoyable visiting, eating, and touring around our teaching schedule.











These photos are of The Forbidden City in Beijing while we are standing on Tienanmen Square, the Terrac

otta Soldiers in Xi'an, and then the Wild Goose Pagoda also in Xi'an.  If you want to hear a truly hair-raising story about life in China, you need to ask Marilyn about the rest of our evening after the photo was taken at Wild Goose. It was much more memorable than Marilyn would ever have wanted it to be. Chinese crowds and fireworks really are something unique!