The legendary Suzhou's wind - China

Motherly instinct: her kid can as well burn in hell as long as her princess skin is screened from the sun light

It's hot in Suzhou, a demotivating kind of hot. As a result I've decided to suspend my daily jogging sessions. Who would have thought that I would suffer it like this after all those years spent training at the tropics? Fortunately on our side we have the proverbial Suzhou's wind, as my friend L likes to call it. Besides cooling your skin the gusts can also knock down your parked bicycle, throw a handful of dust in your eyes and uncover a curvy girl's thigh or boob, in case you are lucky and she's not. The best part of it, though, is spotting one of those affected city ladies nervously grasping the handle of her closed parasol, forced to let the sun scorching her skin like a simple mainland farmer girl. Asian girls actually tend to look quite good when they are tan: I find them more sensual, feline and spicy. Far Eastern people in general though, especially the wealthier ones, consider a dark complexion a loss of status, a stain that must be washed away with expensive beauty treatments or crappy whitening creams, which turn out to be mere sunscreen products in disguise. 
You can watch the little bitches staggering on their high heels under the blows of Aeolus, their little parasol sticking out of their handbag or hanging from their hands, all curled up by the first gust that surprised them after they tried to open it. A bunch of ex-farmers, now working at a city building sites, look at them with a confucian air, betraying no particular emotions, wiping the sweat off their necks, all burnt and abraded by sun, friction and dust. But I'm a coarse and insolent westerner and I can't help staring and sneering at them. 
"...important traditions that must be safeguarded, custom traits that tell the story and culture of a place..." those who are always afraid to offend someone else - even if only by stating the obvious - like to say. 
They are traditions, alright, but do we really have to safeguard them all? It sounds like an empty expression to me, typical of those who care about the political correctness quality of the words they say, often forgetting that those poor words also have a meaning. Almost all of them must be saved, maybe. This one for example - avoiding the effects of sunlight not for health related reasons but because you might become as dark as a farmer and people might think that you are a poor countryside girl, that you don't have enough money to get an education and a boring job in some office, a black window limousine and so on and so forth -  well, it's just a big pile of trash. The sooner it gets stricken off the list of the politburo-authorized-traditions the better for the country. 
Hopefully it will be blown away by the legendary Suzhou's wind.

Even the "grown-ups" now...

At the bus stop

Lost in the middle of the bridge, but with a parasol...

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