Wuhan, China
I realized as I sat next to it with a bowl of reganmian that I’d never actually seen the Yangzi. It’s muddy. We were down in Wuhan for the 10th Anniversary of punk scene mainstay VOX Livehouse, co-founded by a close friend of mine who’s since moved on to greater things. We spent a day confirming that East Lake is, in fact, very large, and two nights holed up on VOX’s second floor balcony with a crew of Beijing music diehards and ne’er-do-wells.
You live in China long enough and you think you’ve seen the business end of “frenetic”, but Wuhan takes real pride in the word. The Beijing intersections used to make me dizzy like that, so many threads of color and activity and mess that you go a little cross-eyed. Thought I was past being overwhelmed by jostlers, but I was only out on Lumo Road for a couple of hours before I needed a whiskey and a nap.
Wuhan’s a great snack city, though. There’s a snack street and everything. Man, I like snacks. I like taking pictures of snacks and stuffing my face with snacks. And as I hold snacking in such high regard, I’m not sure how I failed so badly to do much of it: I spent a good hour staring at piles of pickled garlic and deep fried bing varietals and somehow the only thing I ended up with was some gross taro ice cream dumplings.
