Today's Topic: Transportation in China

            There’s more to this entry than just transport of course, but I feel that it’s time to tell people just how one gets from point A to point B here. First off, there are a lot of bicycles and scooters. Also, sometimes when a bicycle and a scooter love each other very much, they produce this half-breed scootcycle thing. It appears to be a bicycle, complete with pedals, with a motor and headlights. I actually kind of want one. Now we get to the fun part, the buses and cabs. As interesting as the two wheeled vehicles are, these are the rulers of the road. The buses’ maneuvering seems to be limited only by their size, not by such things as lanes o road courtesy. I believe that the intersections are the only places where road laws are adhered to, and then only by necessity. The cabs yield only to buses. If you take the driving of a New York cabbie and deregulate it, you basically have what these cabbies are. Lanes are more of a suggestion, traffic is something to be weaved through, not part of, and merging is done by making it so that the car in the next lane will crash into you if they don’t let you go. Needless to say, crossing these streets is quite an adventure. They are so wide that you can’t just cross the whole street at once most of the time, you have to go partway and then not get hit by all of the buses, cabs, and anyone else crazy enough to get behind the wheel here. Even with all of this chaos on the streets, there is very little noise from it. Horns are only used to get people out of the way, and no one yells. If this sort of driving occurred in New York, there would be murder in the streets, but here there is no such problem. I barely see any accidents, despite how many it appears there should be. My guess is that people follow exactly as many laws as they need to to not get arrested, and not one more. At least it seems to be working for them.

            Anyway, we’re in Xi’an now, which is the ancient capital of several dynasties including the Qin and Han. We saw the old restored city wall two days ago, as well as two incredibly old Buddhist pagodas from around the 7^th century AD. They were pretty amazing, as were the temples that were built around them. We also saw Transformers 2 at an international cinema. That movie is a fairly pure action movie, with a minor plot and lots of explosions and snappy one-liners. It’s still not the hypothetical ideal action movie, which is entitled “River Tam Beats Up Everyone,” but it’s still probably the purest action movie I’ve seen.

            Yesterday we went to see the Terra Cotta Soldiers. I’m probably the only one, but that was actually not as impressive as it’s made out to be. There certainly are a lot of them, and the restoration work is fantastic, but the soldiers are outnumbered by tourists these days. I think that that really ruined the scale of the whole thing, because I was looking at the tourists to get an idea of how many tourists there were to see how many were foreigners, (more on that later) and there really were an absurd amount of them. Maybe if I could see the place empty, it would be impressive, but I have a very strong dislike of large amounts of people with cameras. The things that I like are the places that others don’t see. A perfect example is the place that we’ve been eating dinner. It’s a little hole in the wall place for dumplings, but the food is delicious, and knock on wood, no food poisoning or digestive issues yet. On top of that, dinner cost 32 yuan for the five of us. That’s with the sodas that they go to a convenience store and get for us. I love those little places and things that aren’t what people are trying to show others, the ones that are actually genuine and true to what the country is like.

            Speaking of what the country is like, I’ve been noticing some disparities in the reactions to the new flu over here. The government and news are treating it like a huge deal, but I haven’t seen that many masks here. In Hong Kong, we had a van driver who didn’t want to take us to a site without a mask, and you would see plenty of them on the street, but here I see them almost exclusively on people who are preparing food, and even then I can count on one hand the number of them I’ve seen. Granted, some cab drivers get nervous around us, one even ditched Meredith when she tried to tell him where she wanted to go, but there are still random people who want their picture taken with a foreigner. Then again, the cabbies are older and the people who want pictures tend to be younger, which seems significant. I should have everything sorted by a bit after the trip, and I should be done with my internship paper by the beginning of the school year, which should be quite interesting. I’m curious to see what conclusions I come to.