There Goes the Neighborhood

Last month the character for demolish (chai) appeared on the buildings in the "village" near our office.  This week, it all came to pass.  The copy shop, the mom&pop shop, the donkey burger restaurant, the beauty parlor, the "Fat Boy Noodles" restaurant, the bike repair shop, the Kodak shop-----all gone.  Everyone's had to look for new locations to set up their businesses.  We know where the copy shop went, but we're still hunting for the relocated donkey burger place, not for the donkey burgers, but for their black pepper beef, which was out of this world!  The family that ran the "mom and pop shop" have moved to a district several miles away.  I'm glad they found a place, but we'll miss them, this migrant family from Shandong Province.  Grandma lived with them.  She's a sweety who always had a smile for us foreigners as we walked buy or purchased things from her kids.  She was unique in that she is one of a dwindling number of still-living older women in this society who still live with the effects of bound feet. 

We'll miss them all, but the road really did need to be widened.