a tiny city

3 days ago, accompanying my mother, I arrived at Shantou, a small/tiny city along the south coast of China. My primary intention is to visit my grandma who's already 78 years old. However, this is a tiny city where infomation about people coming and going spreads faster than you think, in such case, my mother said we couldn't stay here without visiting her rather close relatives. So I had to follow her almost everywhere as I felt it obligatory to do so.
Went out to meet a friend at a KTV and I didn't sing at all. It was always awkard for me to go to kareokes because I rarely sing in front of people, unless they're really very close friends. Not until I had to look up the map for transportation means did I realized that I lived far from downtown. There were only 2 bus lines out.
This is a boring city and its language sounds like french to me. I was just understanding very few words within any conversation. Sometimes familiar words pop up and disappear in less than a sec, and reappear and disappear few secs later. Frustrating! But some words sound funny to certain extent, which means I'd laugh when I hear them but my mother'd think I'm crazy/stupid.
Later I discovered, actually my mother discovered a funny line came from a loudspeaker on the street, outside a shoe shop. In mandarin it was "平平钱，买双鞋穿趣味". It rhymes with the sound 'i'. Loudspeaker is the symbol of stores selling low-price goods. Very often sound from the loudspeaker was a male/female's voice saying 'the goods are very cheap here! come and buy! or u'll regret it! because we're closing up! this is ur last chance!'. It's clear that the speaker is playing what is recorded over and over again that it sometimes becomes an unbearable noise, just driving people away asap from the coverage of that speaker. However, that very line reflected the differences between people in ST and GZ. Here the people learned the style of selling from GZ and added their own language and attitude of life. They are casual, content though their living standard isn't even comparable to that of GZ. I've never heard of Cantonese buying shoes just for fun and low-price, they care more about brand and quality. My mother and I thought the line was so brilliant that we deliberately went by that store to hear it again, and I asked her to repeated it for me several times on our way home.
Paid a visit to the notorious boat-bridge which charges 60 for entrance fee, and the newly accomplished ST 1st Middle School campus. The later was pretty much like the HEMC of GZ, beautiful but one of the administrators, my mother's uncle, told us it'll take 6 yrs to fully pay the debts, a long long way to go.
When I stay in, I read and sleep and watch tv and surf the net and of course, write this. There's nothing better to do. I'm glad I finished reading To Kill a Mocking Bird which is such a great novel, friendly words with profound meanings.
One thing I have to mention particularly, is that I hate the motorbikes here, they're absolutely outrageous.
later