Trash

I'm not sure if I've posted about this before, but trash is a big problem here. The main issue is that people do not properly dispose of trash. People will toss trash just outside the door of their house and it piles up and never gets cleaned. It's so strange. There are trash cans, but they often go unused. I took a picture of the cute trash cans in Pingyao, you can see it at snapfish. The trashcans were nice and plentiful, but there was still trash on the ground.

While we waited for our bus to pull away at one stop, we saw one of the group organizers take the box of trash that had been collected on the bus from the bus, to the parking lot behind the bus. She just left it there. This is a beautiful country but because of the trash and the pollution, no one ever notices the beauty. We have mountains not far from here. On a clear day, we an actually see them but that only happens once or twice a month. Yesterday was one of the clearest days we've had and a friend of mine, who has been here for three years, said she'd never seen the mountains like she saw them yesterday. She had no idea they are as big as they are. If the air was clean, this would be a wonderful place to live (if it weren't so far from all of you) and a great tourist destination. (If the air AND the ground, I should say.)