Almost everywhere you go, you will find scenes like this. Mainly older people sitting around, doing whatever they feel like doing. Playing Mahjong, cards, talking (yelling!), laughing at me. It is a very social occassion that seems to take place at almost all hours of the day.

We are in a northern suburb of Nanjing and it is rapidly changing, but it is still common to find scenes like this only a minute or two from the Campus.

In fact, if I ride twenty minutes from my University, I can actually enter the 'country side'. The change from city to country side is quite dramatic. Though the term 'country side' in China is not what we think of back in the west. Think of old towns with broken buildings, rubbish, and fields of crops in between.

Again, this is quite common, though this scene is from Pu Kou, which is just across the river from Nanjing. An interesting area with an interesting history, though in the last year or so it is being modernised - which is probabaly a good thing, as it's a very poor area.