The Nanchang Wall

I'm not sure how familiar you are with the story of the Berlin Wall, but it first came about as a barrier of barbed wire. Then, with too many people fleeing west, the communists began to build a concrete wall nearly overnight in 1961. Berliners woke up one morning and found that they were being walled in by concrete.

I had a somewhat similar feeling when I woke up on Thursday morning. I slowly walked about 10 minutes to the main road to catch the city bus. I found that traffic was even more in a chaotic knot than usual. There was a huge blue barrier with a sign in Chinese informing people that this road would be closed until August 2011! I managed to find a different bus in the opposite direction. Then the bus joined all the mopeds, bicycles, fruit carts, trucks, and other buses on a detour. A 15 minute ride has now become 40 minutes. All the major traffic has been diverted through tiny neighborhood/countryside roads that aren't used to handling that amount of traffic.

Here are some of the interesting things I now see on my way to and from school everyday:
1.) 25 story-tall apartment complexes being built.
2.) Rice paddies and water buffalo.
3.) Lots and lots of rubble piled alongside the road for miles.
4.) Elderly people standing looking confused, wondering why all of a sudden a highway's worth of traffic is now going through their tranquil neighborhoods.

This little journey plunges us into a landscape which is a frenzy of construction and traffic. Then the next minute we have returned to the countryside of 1950s China. This afternoon I rode my bike along parts of this journey today, and took some interesting pictures for you to enjoy. And since I have a bicycle, I can still squeeze around parts of the barriers that have been put up along various points. The blue barrier is being quickly replaced by a million concrete blocks. They are literally building a wall. And for some reason it reminds me of the Berlin Wall. There aren't that many similarities between our "Nanchang Wall" and the "Berlin Wall," except that I'm disoriented by its sudden appearance, and the fact that we do live in a communist country, just like Eastern Germany used to be... And the similarities end there.


(Some of the many high-rise apartments being built).


(A tasty looking pond...)


(More houses).


(People cultivating their tiny gardens in view of a local government building).


(Little Laura at the original Berlin Wall five years ago!)