Early Morning in China

Rather than boring the readers with some description of a run, today I feel compelled to say what's going on at 6am in a mid-size town in South China:
- the wet market (vegetables, etc) is already in full swing. People are making purchases in the total obscurity. To be so early, there is already a good bunch of customers !! The Chinese have the mania of buying always "fresh", as fresh as possible, so they buy the vegetables every day or even they buy them twice a day !! It is not really common to make the shopping for a whole week !! All my neighbours are always staring at me when I come back from the supermarket with 5 shopping bags; they probably guess that I have a 10 people family to justify so much food for a day or two
- already some people going to work; waitress and small shopkeepers. Everyday I meet a couple of waitress who wander around wearing a Chipao (the traditional chinese woman dress, with a long cut along the legs). They look pretty much out of time and place
- contruction workers banging and hammering: the bad think about the fast development of China is that to grow fast, you must also build fast. That means working 24/7 in construction site. You can only pray your own Gods that they would never set up a contruction site close to your home: that involves 1 year of no sleep because the hammering goes on every single day and every single hour
- Cleaners: like everywhere else, someone is working to make up the mess left from the day before. But usually the mess in China is much more than everywhere else because of the bad habit of throwing the garbage everywhere ...
- some early bird like me is also doing his/her own TaiChi exercises or jogging. I remember many years ago I was staying in a hotel in a industrial city somewhere in Jiangxi. The Hotel was a "old style (50s)" site built in a park was it was common at that time ==> at 5am, a large congregation gatherred in the park and start singing and playing musice to go along with the TaiChi !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I got the lesson and now I carefully avoid hotel rooms facing parks !!