Day 19 Bumps for the Blind

There’s not much to report about work today. Basically the highlights were sitting through an hour long meeting conducted entirely in Chinese, playing MASH with my new Chinese friend Xuejing (another intern who we see occasionally) and deciding Evan and James’ futures during said meeting, looking up minesweeper strategies during lunch, and watching Evan “save our office from land mines.” Actually, now that I think about it, today was pretty hilarious, but it was kind of a “you-had-to-be-there” funny.

So another tidbit about Shanghai to make up for my lack of interesting work details: Every single sidewalk in the city has these weird bumps down the middle. It’s about a foot-wide strip in about the middle of the sidewalk that just has raised bumps all down the road. It’s really bizarre, and a major pain to walk on, so Evan, James and I have speculated as to what these bumps are really for. The most logical explanation has something to do with traction, but we have chosen to believe that they are for the blind Chinese who have to walk on the sidewalks. So today, as I was pointing out what a ridiculous theory this was, we made Evan walk on the bumps with his eyes closed to see if he could do it. I’m pretty sure he got about ten feet before cheating, but it was quite hilarious. These boys are growing on me.