sidewalk dangers

Walking down the street in China can be dangerous in ways you might not expect. When I first got here, I had heard about the girl that unexpectedly fell through the sidewalk and was saved by a taxi driver and the woman who fell through the sidewalk into scalding water and died, but you don't really think these things are common place. Turns out they are.

Sometimes it's the sidewalk that collapses, sometimes it's an uncovered hole, sometimes it's a manhole that doesn't have a secure cover. I took both of these pictures on my 10 minute walk to school the other day, it's a very short distance to see two open holes if that gives you an idea of frequency.

Out of the 20ish foreigners I know in Songyuan, two of them have fallen in manholes. Sounds like a small amount, but think about those odds. One of them fell through the other night on the way to a friend's, he stepped on a manhole cover that wasn't secure. The end he stepped on went down while the other end flipped up and he fell in. Luckily he caught himself when he was about waist deep, so only his shoes and the bottom of his pants made it into the sludge below.

What might be equally scary is that he abandoned the shoes due to the smell, and within 30 minutes someone had come by and taken them.