The Hi Yuan Hotel rests comfortably on the banks of the Slender West Lake, Shouxihu, a body of water so narrow at the hotel that it affords no commercial route worth mentioning. Permanently moored in the strait are several large boats serving some unknown purpose, unless they are there to prevent navigation. Finding the bridge to the hotel was a time-consuming mystery that had to be solved by my Nanjing taxi driver.

It was a shock to discover that locating a place for lunch after 2 p.m. was nearly impossible. Were it a Latin American country, I'd have guessed it was siesta time. Where employees had gone I could not guess, nor could the taxi driver.

At last he found a restaurant where five employees were watching a Chinese soap opera on television. We were the only patrons and were much resented. The surly young woman who took our orders was ill-mannered. I noticed that, in setting the table, she grasped the bowls with her thumbs pressed deeply inside. Each of the few dishes she set before us required an interruption of her television engagement, and it was clear she was unhappy about it. I asked my interpreter to apologize to her for our intrusion, and she accepted the apology with no appreciation of the irony.

There is an old Chinese saying: You can take the youth out of the countryside but you can't take the countryside out of the youth.

On entering Yangzhou, I observed that the traffic jumble characteristic of China is more noticeable in this smaller city. No one feels committed to keeping to the right or to staying in his lane. The concept of a passing lane is only in the formative stages here. Horn-blowing substitutes for deft maneuvering. A yellow line on the road may be crossed at will, provided a collision with oncoming traffic can be avoided. A turn may be attempted in the face of onrushing vehicles. Police are seldom seen, although at night they cluster in groups and appear to swap stories of the day's events.

Traffic anecdote: I saw a man dump a cartload of plain, flat window glass in the middle of the street.  He then proceeded to shovel it back into his cart. When, through my interpreter, I asked what he was doing, he said that because the load was so heavy he had tired of trying to move it all at one time.

Thus he had dumped it and was now shoveling half of it back into his cart, and planned to return later to haul away the second half. I was startled that on a heavily traveled road he would dare to do such a thing. It would be a serious offense in the U.S.