The People of Suzhou

 The days are getting hot now.  It's not so much the temperature, which is consistently in the high 80's or low 90's.  It's the humidity.  When you step out of the air conditioning in the afternoon the humidity hits you in the face like a sucker punch.  And the temperature hardly drops overnight due to the moisture in the air - the difference between high and low is only about 8 or 10 degrees.  At any time of day or night it only takes 2 or 3 minutes outside before you're drenched in sweat.  The sweat has no where to evaporate to.

The people of Suzhou are accustomed to this, I suppose.  They've had a lifetime of summers to figure out how to handle the heat.  Most of my colleagues at work have modern air-conditioned homes.  But I'd guess that the majority of folks - especially in the poorer parts of the city - do not.

Some folks have to work in the heat, like the pedal-taxi driver in the top photo or the construction laborers below.   Manual labor here is still very much manual.  Due to the heat, they do not move very fast.  But they move steadily.   It's not unusual to see a man out on the main roads pulling a cart (like the one below)  loaded five feet high.  Maybe 2 or 3 miles they will drag it.  Daily bread comes hard for some.

 Though it's hot outside, it must be hotter still inside the homes.  In the afternoon, you see people - the ones that don't have to work - congregating outside in any place that offers a little bit of shade and a little bit of breeze.  If there is a tree on the block, then you're bound to find a group of men playing cards under it.  Pedestrians always walk on the shaded side of the street.  If there is a wide enough band of shade you might find a group playing Mah Jong, like the folks below.

In the summer time in Suzhou, the barbershop is a chair under a tree by the riverside.

Sooner or later, people get hungry.  So you find a lot of enterprising vendors out selling snacks.  There's fruit and ice cream and plenty of recognizable stuff.  But many of the items I have no idea what they are.  The fellow photographed below is frying a wok-load of sesame-seed-coated-bean-paste-filled-bread-balls.  They're a shell of bread dough about the diameter and skin-thickness of a tennis ball.  The outside is crispy and covered with sesame seeds.  The inside has a thin coating of sweet bean paste.  When you bite into one it deflates and you get a mouthful of crispy bitterness (from the sesame outside) and gooey sweetness (from the soggy bean paste and doughy inside).  It's actually a tasty combination.