Daily Life in China                  

AiZai

The main feature in the town is the basketball court.

Road crew making a mountain road:

The brownish patch on the hillside is where the new road will go. It will zigzag around and over these steep mountains.  The cut it pretty big but you can just barely make out the workers in the photo below. 

The line of workers is just on the high side of the brown cleared section.  It was about 5 o'clock and they all started to make their way up over the mountain.  They criss crossed over the side of they mountain working their way over it.  What you can just barely see at the top of the photo is the beginnings of a shear wall.  They must know a way to get over it.  By the way, there were women and children in the crew.  You can see faults in the mountain face and that made a path for about one person wide which they used to get to the top.  I watched them go higher and higher but it must have taken them two hours to get over the top.  

   I stayed at a villagers house in Aizi and they said the workers were from a village on the other side.  They are probably very happy to have the chance to make some money as in this area there is no industry and certainly nothing but farms where the workers come from.  

Some typical lavish houses for the area around Aizi, south west Hunan. 

To get water into the fields a waterwheel is used.  When the buckets get to the top they tilt into the field canal.  The water head is about 2 feet built by laying stones diagonally across the river.  The river is lined with these small dams.