Who stopped the rain?

Suzhou is green. Hell, it’s a garden city. And a great part about it, is it stays green all year round. It makes the city a nice place to look at no matter what time of year you come here.

The tradeoff is that it rains non-stop. We go from rainy season to typhoon season back to rainy season. It is a stark contrast to my days up in Dalian that, for all its brown-grassed winters, has a huge amount of sunshine.

Which makes this past week a bit of an anomaly. We’ve had almost seven days of straight sunshine.

Normally I wouldn’t complain – and I’m not. I swear, I’m not. But after paying our community’s groundskeeper to whipper-snip our backyard the other day, we discovered the long green grass on top was just a ruse, and underneath is nothing but dry straw-like lawn.

A bit of a before/after photo-representation


The patches of lawn in the photos are the same place – taken 4 days apart.

I can honestly say I never imagined that I’d be uttering the words “I wish I owned a sprinkler” while still living in China. But – there we are.

I turn 31 next week, and nothing drills home that age more than the fact that I am bitching about the amount of sunshine and wishing I had more lawn equipment.

Arg.

6 Responses

  1. haha a sprinkler.. that caught me by surprise. Today was absolutely beautiful.. Couldn’t help cracking a 4 o’clock beer and getting out into the sunshine. I almost didn’t mind the fact I went to Nantong for absolutely no reason today.

  2. @Nick: It’s a little known fact about me that going to Nantong for absolutely no reason today is one of my least favourite things to do.

  3. Mate…..

    I hope you didn’t pay Groundskeeper Willie too much for the job : 20 kuai would have been more than ample (and set an unacceptable laowai-based precedent) to do the ‘back and sides’ 🙂

    I know the monthly redback management fee is good for the guards, gardeners, cleaning Ayis (ladies), rubbish collection chap(s) and alleged “upgrade of water pipes to ensure higher water pressure”. Funny though, we had 2 *variable/semi-notified* tap water outages… and the water pressure is still the same.

    Makes it rather hard to fill the spa at Club Jamieson.
    J.

  4. Ryan

    I’d kill for that backyard grass or no grass. Have you ever though about putting in a pool.

  5. That is common in the Southern part along the Yangtze River. It normally rains endlessly, and that period is called ‘Plum Rain’ in Chinese, which means it rains, and the plum gets ripe.

    Suzhou is a nice city. It literally means ‘County of Su’, in which Su means ‘awake’ or ‘blossom’, from the nice green view in the city for spring and summer. There’s also an old saying in Chinese, ‘For gods there is heaven, and for people there are Suzhou’.

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