I walked an hour and a quarter to work this morning. I felt challenged morally because I wanted to take a taxi, and did try to catch one more than once, but the air was so horrible it felt like the wrong thing to do. Ultimately, I took a longish route and thought I'd cut through the park right by the office: Tuanjiehu. It's a great little free park with a giant meandering lake that is frozen solid at the moment and looks, from my 26th storey office window, like it is cemented over. But thinking I could experience a sweet little shortcut through the park was a mistake. The paths meander like the lake and crossing it was no simple task. I added about 20 minutes to my walking commute.
Last summer when we traveled around the Yunnan and Sichuan provinces we kept running into city open malls or minority village town squares where in the evenings people, often in full minority customary clothes, gathered together to dance. We saw it over and over. This morning, cutting through Tuanjiehu park around 9:30 in the morning, I saw it again. I stumbled across no fewer than six sets of folks gathered together to dance with boom boxes and different sorts of music. I'd have expected those folks to be maybe retired persons but they were from all age groups. Just out enjoying the park, enjoying life, dancing in the morning.
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