Small Town China: Nanxiashu 南夏墅镇

Travels on an ebike in China can not only remind you that you are a foreigner in a foreign land, but also that the urban centers of the small city you live in is actually much more cosmopolitan than what you think. I used to live in the southern part of Changzhou's Wujin district. I left after two years because, well, I got bored and all I did was surf the internet and a lot of drink beer. I thought there was no places to go, nowhere to conveniently meet other expats, and so one. However, during my stay there, I thought to venture even more south within the city's prefecture boundaries, and I ended up in Nanxiashu. The differences between that and the boring place I lived were a bit pronounced. 

Literally, the most interesting thing I saw were two camels and a dog. This was outside the grounds of an elementary school. The school was letting out, and the camels were there as a special treat the kids could hang out with. In all of this, the dog looked a little bit bored. 

I initially went down there to search for a revolutionary martyr's memorial that was listed on Baidu Maps. While I still look for these things, this was one of the first times I realized that these things are not really tourist attractions. Most of them are actual graveyards, and they are just background scenery in the day to day lives of the local Chinese. In Nanxiashu, their memorial to the Civil War / Revolution that brought the communists to power was closed off pillar. 

...which was also surrounded by a murky moat with lots of algae. But the biggest thing I have realized about small town China -- around Changzhou, let me qualify that -- is this ...

It's quickly being developed to look like the rest of Changzhou. A lot of the residential high rises in the area look the same. It's like developers are taking the same architectural blue prints and copying them over and over and over again. It's like a real life version of the game Sim City. No matter where you go, a lot of the buildings look exactly the same. It's like the developers were looking at a map on their computer, clicked on a tract of land, and double clicked "residential complex" in a Sim City interface.