Chinese Babies Need Diapers

After a glorious 20 hour train ride, I arrived in Yichang in one piece yesterday morning. I was feeling slightly battered from sharing a six-bed cabin with a family of ten, but otherwise it was a pleasant enough train ride. Yichang is sort of a run-of-the-mill Chinese city. It's not big enough for a lot of western brands to have moved in, but it's large enough for it to feel like a city. Yeah, it's got a population of 4 million, so clearly it's a city. It's a fairly pleasant place to spend a day. It sits on the Yangtze river, and there's quite a nice park that runs along the river, which made for a lovely afternoon stroll yesterday.

At 5pm this afternoon, I'll be boarding a boat bound for Chongqing. It's going to be a four day journey along the Yangtze River, passing through the Three Gorges....it should be a nice relaxing four days of not much....I hope.

For the most part, I really like kids. I think that Chinese babies are pretty damn cute, but if there's one thing that drives me nuts about babies in China, it's the fact that 95% of them don't wear diapers! If there's one western company that needs a stronger marketing campaign in China, it's Pampers. Apparently, the traditional method of potty training kids around here is to cut a giant hole in the crotch of their pants, and just let them run around and do their business whenever the feeling moves them. The training part comes when parents try to get their kids to go pee on command by whistling in their ear. Clearly, it must be a fairly effective method as most kids I've seen over the age of 3 seem to be well trained, BUT, in the mean time, it means that walking the streets of any Chinese city is an obstacle course of side stepping delightful little puddles of baby pee and feces. China is meant to be traveled wearing closed-toe shoes.