Wet Feet

I got wet feet this morning. That is not normally something to write about, especially as it was raining quite a bit. However I was using a brollie and the rain was slow enough for that to be effective. I thought that how it happened might give you another interesting insight into China: "More and more pavements here are paved with pavement slabs, rather than the 'traditional' concrete. This looks a lot better and, especially with Beijing 2008 coming up, that seems to be very important at the moment. Well, it might look nice, but as usual it is done seemingly without the proper skills or at least without thought for long term effectiveness. Instead of laying the slabs on a nice thick bed of fine white sand, they either put them in cement or they use a thin bed of very coarse sand which contains lots of stones on top of the pre-existing concrete. Either way the result is that slowly more and more slabs come lose and start wobbling. This in turn means that when it rains water collects under the slabs and when you accidently step on a loose slab the water squirts up from underneath it. As you can guess this causes articles like this to be written."