As I mentioned, Changsha is a smaller Chinese city, with about 6 million in the total urban area, and 1.5-2 million in the city itself. With all these people, you would think it would have more than 1 traffic light. Crossing the street is certainly my largest fear here, the city is broken up by huge 8 lane highways and some have underground passages way to cross, but others do not. It is also arranged around a series of circles hich one must run across, making me feel like I'm living in frogger.

There are not too many foreigners, and I am getting used to people staring at me, or taking pictures of me with their cell phones. Common for little kids to point and yell "wai guo ren" or foreigner, and they don't seem to mind when they find out I know what they're saying. One school child even covered her mouth in awe and said "oh my god" in English when she saw me.

But it is a really modern city, you can get anything here that you can in the US, there's a walmart one block away, which I have to say, is very handy to have there. It's quite Chinese, kind of like chinatown with heads of pigs and drying ducks hanging up, mosquito netting, although with anything else you need.