people

All it takes is a trip to our biggest local supermarket, Auchan, to realise (in case I'd forgotten) that China has a lot of people. Too many people really - a ridiculously unfathomable amount of people actually... This supermarket is crammed... I was there on a Wednesday morning at 10.30 - evidently that was a peak hour. There's no way of knowing when peak hour is for this place, as its opened Monday to Friday until 9pm, but always seems to be overloaded. In certain places within the shop, trolleys were at a standstill, one massive traffic jam with people almost crushed in there.... that still doesn't stop the old people especially, from ramming their way through somehow...

I tried to do a rough estimate of people in the shop so that you could get an idea, I'd guess that in any 5 by 5 metre space in the shop, they'd be at least 30-50 people... I'm guessing there was probably over 5000 people in that shop when I was just there (that's far bigger than most concerts I've ever seen).... but who knows... people are trying to move everywhere, but it's a bit like a slowly moving stream of lava... once you enter the place, your direction is guided by those around you... you don't really have a lot of control.... it's incredibly frustrating for a non-shopper like me...

I'm just constantly thinking that it's unbelievably incredible the numbers of people here.... Suzhou itself - a city of 6 million + people is not even in the 20th largest cities of China... it's about an hours drive outside of Shanghai, which in most Western cities would make it an outer suburb of Shanghai... that's a scary thought considering that Shanghai itself is supposed to have anywhere between 13 million - 16 million people...

You see a lot of massive restaurants in China - 3-5 level restaurants that could probably fit about 500 + people on each floor... these restaurants are nearly always full - that's thousands of people all eating at the one place - how many cooks must they have??? Where does all the food come from???