I woke slowly and with sleep still in my eyes peered out through our new ‘dust-net’. I was soon aware that an inch-thick layer of lunar-like dust had again settled and completely covered the bedroom. I carefully rose from the bed, shaking a thin layer of dust from my hair, that troublingly had managed to find a path inside the net. My girlfriend still lay sleeping peacefully.
I padded through into the living room, creating a clearing trail of footprints as I went. I quickly realized, as I slipped headlong into a three foot high pile of dust, that I had left the window open overnight. We recently however had a nifty new particle-vacuum installed, patented here in Xi’an’s very own High Tech Zone. It is positioned beneath the air-conditioner on the wall. I placed the blue mask that came with it over my mouth and turned it on.
It is a quite wonderful contraption, quietly going about its duties, or rather its single duty: the silent and speedy removal of these pesky white particles as I watch. I am not entirely sure how it works, though water has something to do with it, but it does remarkably manage to distinguish the dust from all the other bits and pieces scattered around the house. Within moments it had syphoned the house clear. I had not enquired, nor had I wished to, about where all this stuff goes to. I did hear, though, that it is trucked up to Taiyuan in Shanxi and loaded onto transporter spacecraft and exported to the moon. All part of China’s New Greener Earth space programme. But, I am not sure.
I was no sooner out of the flat and off to work when I found myself falling footlong into a huge hole in the road: “That wasn’t there yesterday,” I had thought to myself as I descended into the pit. Upon landing and while scrambling to my feet I had looked up to see a couple of friendly Chinese faces peering down at me, they muttered the comforting words “Lao Wai” (foreigner) before continuing on their way.
Once I had clambered out and continued on, I happily consoled myself with the fact that this huge hole outside my home was probably part of Xi’an’s subway construction process, now, so I am also told, visible from space. I hope that in time I may well be allowed a more sedate way of descending into the same place, an electric escalator carrying me from the entrance of my apartment to the underground platform below.
This thought made me think of those moving walkway things that you get in airports, so good for a bit of induced urgency and the correlating sense of being important: “I am a world traveler with countries to go and people to see”. I like those things. To think we could have one here on Yang Jia Cun was quite a great thought and left me feeling rather positive about the day ahead.
When I got to the crossroads, and after looking left and right, I calmly approached the mass of entwined vehicles in front of me. Nonchalantly, I clambered over the bonnet of the first car, squeezed agilely in front of a bus, stepped over the rear saddle of an electric moped, which was sandwiched between two taxis, apologizing as I did so, ducked under an open lorry door and made it to the other side of the road. I turned momentarily to observe again the interwoven pattern of vehicles at the junction of my road, before continuing on my way to work.
Tags: Xi'an
西安