Month: November 2017

For a while now I’ve been trying to figure out why the buses in Suzhou are a bit … late … arriving at the bus stops when attempting to ride one. There are no published arrival/departure schedules — apart from general route info — but there are these neat looking electronic screens that tell you which busses are currently headed to the station and how far away it is from the station.

Silly me naturally though the numbers on the right were how many minutes each bus was away from that station. But no! A colleague finally told me that it’s the number of stops away to give “relative distance” and not time. Ugggh. That makes sense now why it seems like a bus that is “4” away takes 8 – 16 minutes to arrive.

It’s a little hard to see in the picture above, but there are paper “schedules” for the routes the busses take. Below you’ll find a zoomed-in picture.

From what I can determine to be true at this point, and who knows if it is true information as I did get the “stops away from” wrong …

• The big number on the left, 120, is the bus route.
• To the right of the bus route number, the bus operating hours are listed.
  • This one starts running at 6am and the last run is at 10pm.
  • Note! This does not mean the bus will be at this stop at 6am & 10pm, but instead a bus will appear at this station at some point between those hours and potentially just after the latest one. Confusing!
• The last two lines below the bus route hours are in pink writing, indicating the type of payments accepted (I think). Not all busses accept debit cards, but this one seems to as the Quick Union Pay logo is shown. (It’s best to get a transit card or have some coins on you.)
• The QR Code is something I’ve not nor seen anyone scan. I’m venturing to guess it’s just general bus information and not all that helpful.
• The vertical Chinese characters to the right of the QR Code lists each of the named bus stops.
• The pink named bus stop is your current location.
  • In this example, that would be 圆融天幕/yuan rong tian mu.
• The blue half-arrow along the bottom points in the direction the bus is traveling so you can determine which are the next stops.

It appears that the busses will display how many stops away (站距/zhàn jù, or literally “station distance”) they are but the subways, oh the subways, they display how many minutes away the next train is. So yeah, that’s the source of my confusion!

Ever make such a mistake when traveling abroad? How about missing the last train or bus of the night and needing to make your way home by other means? Leave a comment and start the discussion in this judgment free zone. (Haha, yeah right … judgment free!)

…Light Saving Time, that is!

Editorial note: Previously I was so confused with the time change that I shifted meetings for work with my colleagues in the USA an hour earlier when they should be an hour later. Oh the joy of sleeping in! This blog post is now being updated to reflect the correct time changes. Or at least what I think is correct! Those changes will be reflected in italics, just like this text.

When the USA messes with most of the rest of the world by following that out-of-date practice of changing the recognized time, it becomes major annoyance. Not only does it make it difficult to know when you should be calling people to speak on the phone or know exactly when your flight might land, it causes havoc for business meetings!

Starting this week my normal 7am meetings for work shift to a 6am start. And that random 5am meeting that pops up every now and then? Yeah, that begins at 4am. Needless to say I might be sleeping through a few of those and/or completely working from home on those days! a lovely 8am start! That’s right! Until some time in the spring of 2018 I’ll get to sleep in most mornings. It will be marvelous!

The time change for DST does not happen here in China. And time keeping in China is pretty simple as there’s only one time zone. For the entire country. A country that’s about as wide as the USA! Think about that for a moment: a country that’s about 2300 miles (3700km) wide and spans four traditional time zones only has one. 5am in Shanghai is 5am in Beijing and Chengdu! The lack of time zones helps for business by keeping everyone on the same clock, but man, imagine the sun not rising until maybe 8am in the winter time if you’re way out in Western China!

Personally I wish the various states in the USA would end this farm-rooted practice and just stop switching the time. (Time keeping is a states rights issue, not a federal one, so each state gets to define it’s own time.) If the USA ends the practice, it’s likely the rest of the world will as well. Until that happens, accept my apology in advance for being extra grumpy in the morning over the next five months! And until the spring of 2018 when the time shifts in the other direction, unless by some miracle Congress gets its act together and forces a national time standard that never switches for part of the year, and then I’ll go back to being grumpy morning Expat Richie.

If Wuhan was any indication of what the rest of central China will be like, I’m going to stick to the coastal cities for the majority of my intracountry travels. 

I found Wuhan to be a place with not much to do for foreigners. And if there was a place you wanted to go, it’ll take you a long time to get there due to the heavy traffic within the city limits. Why city planners felt that three and four laned traffic circles where major thoroughfares connect was a good idea just flabbergasts me. 

While the local people were rather friendly, my command of Mandarin is still lacking which made even simple tasks difficult. For example, after catching the wrong bus back from a team dinner and being dropped off at a hotel where I was not staying, trying to command a taxi was not easy nor was ensuring the correct destination was understood by the driver. (Don’t worry, I did sleep where I was supposed to that night so this adventure has a happy ending to it.)

You hear tales and see pictures of cities where there are neighborhoods of new buildings in all states of completion but no one lives in them, making entire square miles ghostowns. I’ve now experienced this first hand and can say it’s rather creepy weird. There’s only so much truth to the phrase “If you build it, they will come” before you just build too much and there’s no one left who’s coming. Yeah, Wuhan.

A great read

No, I’m not talking about a read as in playing poker, though I did clean up quite well on the train ride back to Suzhou from Wuhan today! But rather, I’m talking about a book my friend Gregg Chavaria published a year and a half ago. His story, My Journey to Meet Jane Goodall, has many similar parallels to what’s going on in my life these days and did, to a rather large extent, help me decide upon taking this chance to move to China and see what life has in store for me. 

As the holidays are approaching, consider buying this book as a gift for yourself or others. It’s an easy, good read and provides insight not only into the life of a impressive man finding his way in life but also adds an air of familiarity to one of the greatest researchers and scientists of our time. Somehow Chavaria is able to make it seems like you, the reader, are there with him and Jane Goodall in a way that you all become friends!