EnShi: The city

This town is both mad and beautiful like the quite girl in high school that you could never get off your mind. For comparisons sake, it reminds of Gatlinburg without all the commercialism. There are mountains on the horizon (not really tall mountains, but mountains nonetheless) that you can see only when the omnipresent fog lifts every night in the few hours before dark. The city itself is composed of your stereotypical chinese buildings: pagodas, shanties, etc. But it is the people themselves that make this town. A few nights ago some people set off professional grade fireworks a few hundred feet from my apartment for longer than a half hour (reason? it was thursday night of course); all the women of this city do dances in large groups that are reminciscint of syncrhonized swimming above ground; and the high rises of downtown Enshi are covered with neon lights that are coordinated to put on a disco light-show every night. If I only knew Chinese it might be the perfect town: totally wild in it's 200,000 person obscurity. I think I'm falling in love with it. In fact, I'm already contemplating how much I'm going to miss it. And I've been here three days.

Is it rolling Bob?

The basics: I have made it to EnShi safely. I am having the oppisite of a electronic renaissance. Right now I am typing on a computer that has nothing but Chinese characters. And this is only a test post. More to come when I can log onto my desktop.