Changes in Nanjing

Here are pictures of my view outside the window from my room: 

The apartment building in front of mine

You can see the little park on the bottom where senior citizens go to exercise. 

 Mostly, Nanjing is exactly the same as when I left. The main difference (in terms of environment and surroundings) from a couple years ago to this year is that there are at least three times as many foreigners in Nanjing now. This is especially prevalent in the neighborhood where I live, Gu Lou, because this is where the university is located. As a result they renovated one of the buildings across from the foreign students dorm. Here are pictures to compare: 

February 2010, when Ice Bing was being renovated into Talking

August 2011, the outside is completely different.

Happy Lady is the store in between the two Talkings

  

With the Talking expansion, they kicked out one of the vendors. There was one vendor called Happy Lady (兴旺), and we nicknamed the guy next to her Happy Man. I wasn't there, but the story goes that one day when they were renovating, they kicked out Happy Man because his shop was "sticking out." I don't remember his shop sticking out, but I think they replaced him with another Talking bar. 

Apparently, Happy Man was just standing there in the middle of the street with all his stock... they literally just kicked him out one day without notice. So everyone in the foreign students dorms came out and bought up his leftover stock. He said thank you to everyone and said everything was going to be okay because he would open up a shop somewhere else. That story made me cry because he was my favorite vendor ever and his baby son would hang around sometimes in the summer. Now that Happy Lady doesn't have any competition, she expanded her store to three times the size and raised some of the prices. 

 

Some other differences I noticed:

-less staring

-more big dogs, especially Labradors

-more expensive

-iPad2 obsession
-more body tattoos