At several parks in town roller blade lessons are the happening thing for young people.  We see these lessons at Renmin Park near the city centre, Xin Bei Park near our apartment, and in the square in front of City Hall.  The idea is to keep the kids busy with learning some skill or studying to become smarter.  It’s all about trying to position one’s children to have them a leg up on their age-mates in the competitive job markets.  The unbelievable population of 1.6 billion people makes for a lot of competition

Another photo from early evening as I look out the kitchen window.  This is a fancy restaurant called the Shanghai Home Restaurant.  I can actually recognize the first two characters as those for ShangHai.  As you might notice, these photos don’t fit into any kind of particular theme, they are just snippets of what we see in daily life.

And now, a final photo for today.  This is a little girl we often see sitting on this chair outside of her parents’ small Muslim restaurant, a little noodle shop that is a popular place with the university crowd as the food is good and, more importantly, cheap.

Almost everything happens on the street.  In between busy parts of the day, the shop and restaurant owners hang out their laundry on racks.  Small businesses cook their noon meals or evening meals in rice cookers on a table near the cash register so that they can prepare the meal while also taking care of occasional customers.  There are no dull moments, even in a short walk of only one block in length.