The deal with all these irritants is stop feeding them. Neighbours, pigeons, dogs. STOP LAYING OUT GARBAGE BANQUETS FOR THEM AT MY DOOR! Riding around I sometimes get the impression everyone does live in garbage. Seemingly intractable piles of litter are to be found everywhere. With the shit that gets strewn around buildings sites, you could say progress in China is built on garbage. Magical tropical paradii such as [nowhere] and [neverwhen] are my final destination. I won't be able to pay for any of it and unless I start making tangible plans soon, I'm not even going, so..........
I expect Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, all those places, they are strewn with garbage too. Actual human infrastructure barely exists here, I don't see why it would exist in less developed places, but maybe those places are less fucked up too?
I think in China development, which has been good for many, has also, frankly, to be the imperialist for a moment (longer), stripped the place of "charms". Charm, in a poor country, is that simple infrastructure that exists above subsistence farming and below urban development. For example, restaurants can exist, and they'll often be open all hours and all days because the owners are too poor to think of themselves as people who can take time off. That was China ten years ago. That's not China now. Would I genuinely like to go exploit the masses elsewhere for a while and call it retirement? If they have internet then yeah, maybe.
The other strand of this style of think is I don't think I'm going to make it. I'm going to get older, weaker, and less able. I fear and hate that. It'll be like teaching English again.