Later that day, it’s still Sunday

We had lunch in Pingjiang Lu, which is the main tourist street in the old city which lets us see an example of how the old Suzhou really looked. I’ve walked up here many times and have seen them pick the rubbish out from the water using nets. They use small boats with electric engines so that they can go about their business quietly. It’s a very pretty street and a main attraction. Today however I was surprised to see that for almost the complete length of the business area, the water has been drained. It looks like they are shoring up the banks and the building running alongside the river, maybe even under pinning the buildings. You can see many of the old timbers sticking up but they are not attached to anything anymore. In places acro props are seen holding up the foundations of buildings that have been undermined by the river.

The rubbish lying on the river bed is abundant and the river bed has a thick black sludge that smells divine. There are dams built at each end of course and at each crossroads of the river and large pumps are constantly pumping water from the river bed. The water table here is very close to the surface and so they need to keep the pumps going or it will just flood.

There using a high pressure hose to “clean” the sludge and filth away from the sides of the walls. One guy has both arms in the water and sifting the river bed looking for god knows what, bare handed and black up to the elbows. I was pleased to see however that he had his safety helmet on.

You would think that they would have given him a pair of gloves, but I guess you can’t really feel your way but I can’t image sticking my hands into the bottom of this riverbed.

Further along there are a couple of JCB’s filling big bags which will be lifted out by another JCB that was sitting up top. It’s quite the spectacle and I’m sure it will be a long time before this kind of thing happens again. I found it really interesting to see the foundations of the buildings which of course normally are under a meter or so of water, but I look forward to seeing it back to its former glory.