Wuhan Half-Month Journey (Part 2)

It’s already the 12th day I’ve been in Wuhan.

The farthest places I’ve traveled to are Hangzhou, Beijing, Dongguan, and Shenzhen. Coming to Wuhan, I still feel a bit excited, so I treated this training session as a kind of tour. Before leaving, I thought that the training location would be a high-end place, just like what I saw in short videos—an elegant professor giving a lecture at the front, and us sitting in a multimedia classroom with a sense of learning. Wuhan, as a new first-tier city, is no less than Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen.

But upon arrival, I realized the gap between my expectations and reality. Wuhan in front of me is a city where electric scooters zip by, and delivery workers are everywhere. The training was held in an old school building with terrazzo floors and classrooms with windows. Walking on the streets, I looked at the people walking by, the parked cars, the residential communities, and street food stalls. It felt like Wuhan is just a bigger size, but not much more refined than a small town.

What moved me even more was a childhood friend around me: he studied hard and got into a university in Wuhan, settled down here, and with his own efforts plus family support, bought a house worth 2 million yuan. Now, with the housing prices dropping, he feels a bit discouraged when he talks about the price falling by over a million. Education changed his destiny, but fate also handed him the real estate market—it’s like eating a sugar candy and getting slapped in the face.

I wonder, what is the difference between a big city and a small city? It should be that no matter where you are, only the top 1% can live comfortably.
(Just like this beautiful landscape photo, we are looking at the distant tall buildings, while the six-story small buildings below are the mainstream.) Attached photo