Chengdu (成都) is the provincial capital of Sichuan and an entry point for travels into Tibet and other places in West China. But this time I did not come here to fly further into plateau region, but for work in our car factory and looking at electric car charging infrastructure. Chengdu has been a settlement and feudal capital for thousands of years and is one of the first tier cities of China. I like Chengdu. The pace is much slower than in Shanghai and Beijing, which makes it very livable. People are nice, the air is clear, traffic not too bad and food just brilliant. Modern Chinese cities have a bit of a limited development pattern when if comes to local characteristics. You have to look for the details, because on first sight they look very much the same and tend to be of a mix of grandness and tristesse. It is because of all of them basically started the main stage of the current physical environment more or less at the same thing at more or less the same time. There is a lot of modern or pseudo classical "hardware" around, but it has not grown organically and it is hard to get it alive (with alive I don't just mean noisy). It will take time and trial and error. When I was driving out to the factory today in the Southwestern suburbs, I saw a lot of residential construction work. In terms of magnitude the economy some of these Chinese megacities are comparable with for example whole countries like Greece. And there are buildings which are in terms of habitants comparable with a Greek island. I was not sure, whether this tells me how small the current Greek economic crisis actually is for Europe or how big problems China would be, if ever the real estate industry collapses here. At a growth rate of population of about +25 % last year in Chengdu it looks like the capacity will find their occupants. But then, what will happen to the rural areas?