Tuesday afternoon, February 15, after doing some shopping with Jenny, the K Boys, Tony and Andis, were made to take a walk. They boarded a bus, the #25 to be exact, without a destination in mind. Andis had some vague idea about going to the newly constructed fast train station that, he had heard, was somewhere in the area.
After riding past four stops, they got off the #25. They walked along a fairly busy road as Andis looked for a sign indicating how to get to the fast train station. He didn’t see one, so he decided to walk along the road in the direction of a bridge which crossed a canal busy with boat traffic.
He first decided to walk into a residential area which had been built around a pool of water. The houses were the kind often seen in the countryside – all made of brick and cold as hell inside. The water, he saw was was murky and greenish, but he saw the residents use it to clean clothes and wash vegetables for cooking. He took the following photo:
Residents would walk down the steps and squat on the narrow concrete ledges, in the photo, to wash clothes and vegetables.
It was just as the photo above was taken that Tony told Andis to turn around and go back to the main road. Andis had hoped to see where the path he was walking would lead but Tony wasn’t interested. So, Andis instead walked past the pool again. He got back along the road and walked past the residential area noticing how trees were grown to separate the houses from the busy highway. Beneath the trees, Andis saw lots of garbage.
Walking past the residential area, they came to a major intersection. To the right, Andis saw a sign indicating that a wind technology industrial park was near by. Behind the sign was a park area that Andis hoped would allow him and Tony to walk along the canal which was probably 200 meters from the intersection. If they choose to walk straight, along the main road, they would cross a bridge over the canal.
Andis decided they would rightwards toward the park. The Wind Technology Park Sign, which had only recently been erected, was already showing signs of falling apart. Andis, trying to read the Chinese characters, saw that some strokes on the sign had either fallen off or been vandalized.
There was a nice area of park near the sign and the intersection – it certainly was attractive to drivers passing by. In the distance towards the canal, Andis saw an area with fountains, paths, pools, and pedestals for flowers, but saw no path to get to it. So, he had to Tony over sod to reach his goal.
The Park looked like it had only been used by the workers who had landscaped the area and built the sitting areas. It was new and yet covered with dirt. What had been built was nice in theory. There was a man-made pond with an island. There were tiled paths and steps around the pool. The were places for park visitors to sit and pedestals set up for flowers which visitors could presumably contemplate.
Tony played in the park:
After sitting on those seats, Tony was brown with dust.
The park, despite being new, had a forlorn quality to it. In the island, one could see a discarded boot. Andis wondered why it was there and decided to take a photo of it because it made for a stark sight. Andis would solve the mystery of the boot later.
There were paths to nowhere.
The Park was close to the canal. But the area near it wasn’t pretty.
Eventually after tip-toeing through the garbage and ascending a steep sided incline to get onto a dike like wall, Andis and Tony were able to look over the canal.
The walk on the dike was great because the path was paved. And the view was something. Andis and Tony saw boat and freeway traffic – the Modern China as contemplated by its engineer-rulers.
Andis and Tony trod the path all the way to the bridge
Turning around, they walked beside the old building that overlooked the fountain area.
In front of the building, in the picture above, the land was being used to grow cabbage.
A closer inspection of the building revealed it had been abandoned.
Strewn around the factory grounds, were boots, like had been seen on the island. Andis conjectured that this was an old boot factory.
Walking past to the other side of the factory, they saw another piece of park architecture that looked like it was built but never used.
What was the point of building this thing? Andis wondered. Was it way of padding GDP numbers? Useless parks, abandoned buildings, and piles of garbage were not ways to make a country very rich. In fact, they were sign that something was amiss.
Andis Kaulins in China 