Xiao Fei is very proud of his home city. It is a beautiful place and we very much enjoyed learning about tit from him. Here is a pic of him passionately describing the city’s history to us atop the city wall.
He told us Xi’an was a city of about 50,000 people as recently as 50 years ago. Today is has more than 8-million. It is basically the size of Chicago. WOW!
And it ain’t done growing yet! As we drove around the city, from the airport to the Terra Cotta Warriors everywhere we went, we saw scaffolding and new buildings being built. Virtaully every one of them were new apartment buildings or condos. They are all cookie cutter identical to each other, mostly 20 or 30 stories high with dozens of units on each floor. Look at this picture the Susan Weiner took for a bit of an idea what I am talking about.
Can you even count all the apartment buildings in that pic? Can you imagine what that will do to traffic and infrastructure when thousands of people fill those apartments? The above picture was repeated time after time as we drove around the city. It is terrifying!
It is also a pity. Xi’an seemed like a wonderful place and we all really enjoyed it. I fear what it will become in a few years though.
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