Huaihua is a city of about 5 million and growing. We know this, in part, because we can see the changes happening daily. There is construction near to us where they are building a new road, to connect to the bridge that has already been built, the road just hasn’t made it there yet. Also we sneakily use Google Earth to orient ourselves with our neighbourhood, and those images are rather outdated. We say sneakily because we don’t want any Chinese to know we have this VPN encoding system, since the Big Red Brother is watching you.
Some interesting transportation options always in 2nd/3rd world countries, this gives the phrase ‘wide load’ another meaning:

There are motorcycle taxis, you can tell it’s a taxi because it has an umbrella awning on it.
We went to the ‘Better Life Mall’ to the big supermarket. They employ 2-3 people per aisle to help you make your choices. I’m not one for full-service shopping so I think this is a bit annoying. Here’s the girls with their new set of fans: