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.
