Traffic accidents in China

I may have implied in previous posts that the stereotype about Chinese people being terrible drivers might, in fact, have a fairly firm grounding in reality. It does. That isn't to say that all Chinese people are terrible drivers. My wife, for example, is an excellent driver as are many of our friends. It is incontrovertibly true, however, that the general level of driving ability here is well below what would be acceptable in any western country. But that is a post for another day.

Today I want to write about an inevitable consequence of the large number of unskilled drivers on the roads in China - traffic accidents.

Dongyang Photowalk Part Trois (that's three)

Welcome back for the third installment of my Dongyang photowalk. If you are just joining us, the first and second parts can be found here.

If you haven't been following along I'll fill you in quick. I went out with my camera into the wild, concrete jungle that is Dongyang, Zhejiang, China. I took pictures of things that interested me. I had to be extra-super-ninja-sneaky when taking candid shots of people because I'm pretty much the only white guy for 50km in any direction. Also... no wait, that's about it, I guess.

I include here another set of pictures that I like with even more of the snarky commentary you've come to expect. All of that after the break, just click through to see.

More photowalk highlights from Dongyang (东阳)

This post continues from where I left off in this post the other day. As I mentioned there, I went on a photowalk (photoride/photosit/photodrinking coffee) in this tiny little flyspeck village of a million people where I live, and I took some pictures of things that interested me. I share some of them in the hopes that they will also interest you.

To save bandwidth for those on mobile devices or who use readers and don't want to wait for pictures to load (or who don't want to see them at all) I'll include a break in this post. Click through to see some Dongyang pictures with some sarcastic commentary from yours truly. I'll try not to be too snarky this time.

Dongyang (东阳) Photowalk Highlights

In my first week or two using Google+ I happened to add a large circle of photographers. Two things happened as a result; I got to look at photographs much better than anything I can take (yet), and I found out about something called a photowalk.

A photowalk is when you go for a walk mostly so you can take pictures along the way. Many people do this in groups and it is a social event. I don't know many people here who are interested in photography. I do know a number of people who own very expensive cameras, but they are more interested in making sure everyone knows how expensive it is than in learning how to use it.

At any rate, I went on a solo photowalk the other day (except I rode my bike) and took some pictures of some people and some places and some things. I thought I'd share some of the better ones ones I like the most.

I'll put any photography related comments in italics in between the picture and my "social commentary" in case anyone is interested. In a related note, all pictures were taken with a Canon Powershot S5 IS. They are presented here straight from the camera with no post processing. My philosophy is to try and improve my skills with the camera rather than with the computer. 

This picture shows the limitations of my camera quite effectively. It is a very, very good point and shoot camera and I love it, but no matter how small I make the aperture I can't make it give me a narrow depth of field.Had I been able to make the camera do what I wanted the boy would be in sharp focus and the girl would be blurry enough that you couldn't recognize her. This is the best I could do with the equipment I have.

While out riding I stopped (for 4 hours) to have a cup of coffee with the other foreigner who lives here. I decided this was no reason to stop taking pictures.

This little guy was fascinated by the two white guys having coffee. He started out by walking up and standing about three feet from our table and staring at us for a few minutes. He was surprised when I asked him what he wanted in Mandarin Chinese (Chinese people always assume that Caucasians are genetically incapable of learning their language - usually with good reason). When he didn't answer me I switched to the local language and he just about fainted. After that there was no getting rid of him.

I was working mostly on my framing and composition on this one. I wanted to catch the feeling of the location while maintaining attention on the two people. I used a fairly small aperture (and correspondingly high ISO) to try and zone focus on the girls.

Dongyang is a small town of almost a million people and is part of a larger metropolitan area called Jinhua that holds more than 4 million people. It has a population density of 420 people per square km (just for reference, I grew up in a place with a population density of 1.75 people per square km). Thirty years ago, however, it was all farms and while you can take the farms away from the farmers, you can't make the farmers stay indoors, pay for electricity, or stop spitting.

The people here tend to spend a lot of their time outdoors doing activities that most westerners would consider indoor activities. Here a woman is teaching her granddaughter how to knit. At the risk of being too cynical, it says something about the housing here that sitting in the back alley is more comfortable than sitting inside.

Great big old aperture on this one. I wanted both the foreground and the background in focus. I really with I had a wider lens on this camera. I'd love to do some landscape photography around here, but I can't get a wide enough angle of view. Someday I'll get a DLSR and the first lens I buy (aside from the kit lens) will be a nice wide 16-35mm.

This is one of my favorites.

There are a number of places like this where there's a cement wall and someone has knocked a hole in it, and on the other side you can see a green space. Every time I see one I get Pink Floyd's "Another Brick In The Wall (pt. 2)" stuck in my head (except instead of "brick" my brain sings "hole"). Also, this image ties in with a novel I'm working on in interesting ways (more on that later).

These holes are made for a very specific reason, any guesses what the reason is?

An update

I thought it might be high time to update the old blog with recent events, but before I do that...

Hello to all my new subscribers!

It seems a bit odd to me that the number of people who subscribe to my blog should quadruple in the three weeks I don't post anything, but it is what it is. I hope you enjoy what you find here and that you make your presence felt in the comments.

Now, on to the news which consists mostly of;

• I finally finished the short story I've been working on. Again.
• I'm modifying my vision for the blog slightly. Again.
• We (the Baby, the Wife, and I) are off to Canada in 10 days for a visit. For the first time. 

The Short Story

First, the short story. I wrote a short story almost a month ago. I was very pleased with it, especially with the second half of it which I wrote in an hours-long cathartic burst of creative YARGH! Two or three days later I copied the document from my tablet to my desktop so I could start editing. I write on both machines, so when it popped up saying there was already a file by that name I thought nothing of it. "Copy over that one," I said.

So I lost the last half of my short story. The part where the language flowed like burgundy and dripped like liquid gold. The part where the characters came right off the page and burrowed into your brain and built a nest there. The part where the awesome happened. I'd forgotten that I'd written the last part of the story on the desktop, not on the tablet. I actually wept.

This is in large part why I haven't been very active with the blog for a few weeks. I haven't actually been writing anything - nothing creative anyway. I've been active on twitter (active for me, anyway). I've been very active on Google+ (you should sign up, if you haven't). I've even been active on Facebook. What I haven't been doing, however, is writing. I couldn't.

The loss of those few pages of writing crippled me a little. I was intimidated by myself, I guess. The section of writing I lost was good. Really good. The thought of trying to recreate it made me feel nauseous. So I didn't try.

Finally, yesterday, I looked myself right in the brain and said, "So are you a f**king writer, or aren't you?" It turns out the answer is yes. I didn't recreate the section I'd lost, but I did write it again. It isn't as good now as I remember the first version being, but at least now it exists in some form. More importantly, I feel as though I've passed a hurdle. The burden I felt slide from me as I hit save is indescribable (and I'm reasonably proficient at describing stuff).

So I'm back to writing again. Onward and Upward.


The Blog

This one is pretty simple, really. I realized that while I'm interested in technology, I'm not interested enough to write about it regularly. So I won't.

Likewise, I don't listen to enough new music to write about music regularly. So I won't.

I watch the same two or three TV shows and usually not until several days after they air. If I were to write about TV it would be quite repetitive and not at all timely. So I won't.

I will continue to write about China. I enjoy that, and I've gotten the impression that my readers do as well.

I will also write about writing, at least writing from my point of view. As I travel along this road of becoming a professional storyteller, I'll share the bumps and snags and pitfalls I encounter and the ways I find to cope with them. For example, yesterday I learned that swearing at your own brain helps you stop refreshing social networking sites and makes you finish a story.

I will also post some things about music and technology from time to time, but only when I feel like it. I am also getting back into photography again these days, so I may share some of what I'm learning in that arena as well. It tends to tie in with my China posts because, after all, I'm mostly taking pictures of things in China.

As I continue to change and evolve, so too will my blog. This plan is only in effect until the next plan takes over. :)


The Trip


So. We leave in 10 days. It's a 24 hour journey - 16 hours on a plane, 3 hours in an airport, another couple of hours on a smaller plane and voila! We're there. Doing this with an 18 month wiggleworm is going to be... interesting. I have plans for that (they involve Teletubbies and Shaun the Sheep on my tablet, mostly) so we'll see how that works.

This trip is the other reason I haven't been present around here much of late. We will be gone for two and a half weeks, and we don't have enough time between when we get back and the end of the term to make up all the classes we'll have missed while we're gone, so we've been working overtime to make up the classes before we go.

I've only been back to Canada once in the past 8 years, and this will be the first time my wife or son have been there at all, so to say we're excited doesn't really cover it. Current plans include a weekend in the Canadian Rockies, a number of BBQs, a fishing trip to northern Saskatchewan, a weekend in Calgary with a couple of the best people in the world (and probably a trip to the zoo), and a bunch of relaxing with my family. Heck, I checked out of here mentally two weeks ago.

Umm, yeah.

So, that's what's been up with me. What about you?

For my new subscribers in particular, but also for anyone who happens to be reading this, tell us a bit about yourself in the comments. Who are you and what do you like to do? Do you have a blog? A website? A google+ profile? Can we add you on twitter? Do you raise purebred dalmatians for fire houses? Inquiring minds want to know, and blogger only tells me how many of you there are, not who you are. Unless you say something down below I have no way of getting to know you.

Cheers,

Mike

So, You're Moving to China: Personal Space

Dear Imaginary Person,



So far I've told you about some of the smells and sounds you'll encounter when you get here, and it's true that both of these sensory assaults can take some getting used to. You can rest easy, though, in the sure knowledge that you will get used to them. There is something else that I should tell you about, and it's something that you may never get used to. Knowing about it ahead of time might prepare you to better cope with it, though, so here it goes; Chinese people stand really close to you.

You might think I'm having a laugh, or making a bigger deal than I should about something that doesn't really matter very much, but I'm as serious as a heart attack about this. People here stand entirely too close to you, close enough that you can smell what they had for breakfast three days ago, and it will drive you batty. Your idea of personal space is tied directly into the part of your brain that decides whether to run away from someone or tear out their throat, and different cultures have a different idea of what constitutes that space. Canadian personal space is more or less as far as you can reach without stretching; if I can easily put both of my hands on you, you are in my personal space, and I am in yours. Chinese personal space seems to extend to the end of the eyelashes, or occasionally to the end of the nose.

This plays out in a number of ways in daily life here. When lining up for things (if you can get people to line up), you will step up to the back of the line a comfortable distance from the person in front of you. One of two things will then happen. Some people will assume that if you are standing that far away from the next person you aren't actually in the line and they will push in front of you. They may well actually push you; remember - eyelashes. Some people will realise you are also in line and will step up behind you. You will feel their breath on the back of your neck. They will make glancing contact with your clothing. You will be convinced that they are trying to pick your pocket (they might actually be trying to pick your pocket - that happens a lot). This only happens when there is a queue though, so don't worry over much as it is next to impossible to get Chinese people to line up for anything.

The more common way you might experience this is with friends and co-workers. I can recall several occasions when I was walking down the street with a friend and I had to tell him that if he continued to walk that close to me I would have no choice but to punch him in the head. He was a close friend - we shared an apartment for a couple of years - but he was walking with his arm in almost constant contact with my arm and every time I widened the space between us he immediately closed it. The sidewalk was otherwise empty, so there was no reason for such close proximity aside from his idea of personal space differing so drastically from mine.

This is another one of those differences where Chinese folks will tell you it's because there are too many people in China. The thing is, outside of the bigger cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen the population density isn't any higher than in many western cities (where people don't crowd each other unless there is no other choice whatsoever). Here they crowd each other even in otherwise empty spaces. Habits are funny things, unless they are other people's habits.

Yours,


Mike

So, You're Moving to China: The Nose Knows

Dear Imaginary Person,


In my last letter I told you about the sounds of China, and how the first thing I noticed here was the noise. The thing about living in a noisy environment is that you pretty quickly develop selective hearing. After a few weeks you don’t even notice most of it any more. Except for the street washing trucks*. And the laowai** comments. You always notice those. No, what has really made a lasting impression on me are the smells. Food smells, street smells, the smell of animals, the smell of people, the smells of construction and manufacturing, and every so often the smells of natural, growing things. China is a land of many smells.

For example;

So, You're Moving to China: The Sound and the Fury

Dear Imaginary Person,

[name redacted] mentioned that you were planning on spending some time in China and asked me to fill you in a bit about what to expect. As I do love the sound of my own voice (clack of my own keyboard?), I am happy to help.

The first thing that struck me when I arrived in China was the noise. Well, no, that’s not quite true. The first thing that struck me was the heat and humidity. I grew up in the Canadian prairies; 30°C is a hot summer day, and 0% humidity is normal. I arrived in Hangzhou on July 9, 2004. It was in the vicinity of 45°C with a relative humidity of sauna%. I had trouble breathing for the first few days.

Once I got used to the weather, though, the first thing I really noticed was how noisy China is. Chinese people will tell you that it’s because China has too many people¹ and it’s true that, at least along the heavily developed East coast, there is an awful lot of traffic, construction, and crowding – all of which contribute to the elevated level of ambient noise.  The thing is, while I lived for 7 years in Hangzhou, a wealthy city of about 10 million people (many of whom own cars), I currently live in a small city (DongYang) of only 1 million people and I have spent a lot of time in small villages of a few hundred people. They are all noisy. All of them.

I have developed a theory to account for this. The theory is this: Chinese people are loud. They talk loudly, they eat loudly, and they blow their noses loudly (and often without the benefit of a tissue). They watch TV loudly, and they listen to music loudly. I’m still not entirely sure why they are loud, but it isn’t because of too many people. On the contrary; the smaller the village, the louder the villager. Two middle-aged DongYang ladies having a conversation in an otherwise empty room are audible from three buildings away, and their cell phone ringtone can be heard in the next village². The default volume setting on most televisions here is “distortion”, and the majority of shops in most downtown shopping areas put large PA speakers outside their doors to blast passersby with the latest Japanese and Korean pop super-hits (and Lady Gaga, of course)³.

Don’t let any of this bother you, by the way. You’ll soon develop the ability to tune the majority of it out completely. You might not even notice it as much as I did. Keep in mind that we Canadians are a pretty quiet bunch (3 Chinese people make about as much noise as 30 Canadian prairie-dwellers), so it was a bit of a shock to my system. If you are from a bigger city, or a large family (especially a large Chinese family) you might not notice anything out of the ordinary at all; until Chinese New Year, anyway.

Chinese New Year makes the rest of the year seem like the cozy confines of a library or crypt by comparison. Everyone (and this will include you) who is in China for Chinese New Year makes a video of themselves “reporting from the front lines” of wherever the US is currently dropping bombs. The unrealistic aspect is that the US never drops that many bombs, that steadily, for that long. In the major urban centers they have restrictions on the fireworks and actually enforce them much of the time. In the country side… not so much. This most recent CNY (old-timer speak for Chinese New Year, of course) was our first in DongYang.

In Hangzhou the fireworks go on for two or three days. They are non-stop the whole day leading up to New Year’s Eve, and then peter off towards 3am or so. In Dongyang, we experienced 2 solid weeks of non-stop bombardment. I’m serious. For two weeks there was not a single moment of a single day that we couldn’t hear the explosions of fireworks. Day time, night time; it didn’t matter, stuff was exploding. Fireworks were being set off at the base of our building. We live on the ninth floor. Most fireworks sold in China explode between 8 and 12 stories up, so we had firework sparks hitting our balcony doors pretty regularly. It was insane.

At any rate, I hope none of this has scared you off or made you second guess your plans. I also hope you aren’t a light sleeper. You may want to acclimatize yourself by trying to have a conversation while blow-drying your hair or by hanging out with airplane mechanics while they work. The noise isn’t really a huge problem; it’s just one of the many differences I had to get used to.

Yours,

Mike

1. This is the reason Chinese people will give you for almost any oddity you mention about China. It is almost never the actual reason. China does have a lot of people, but the population density isn't that much greater than in many other places.

2. I'm exaggerating slightly.

3. I'm not exaggerating at all.

That's my boy

Yesterday was a hellish day filled with extended travel via public transportation and mind-numbing amounts of governmental bureaucracy. We had to go from Hangzhou to the Canadian Consulate in Shanghai to apply for Tyler's proof of citizenship card and passport. By the time we'd arrived back where we'd started (not home, sadly) we were sore, cranky and exhausted. I did, however, learn something very important yesterday. My son is awesome. I can't tell you how proud I am of that little man.

Our day began at 5:30am. It was raining, and we had to catch a taxi to the train station on the other side of Hangzhou's downtown. We counted on at least 40 minutes in the taxi, and our train tickets were for 7:00. What we didn't count on was the 20 minutes it took to catch a taxi, or the taxi driver's inexplicable refusal to drive faster than 40km/h. We also didn't count on Tyler throwing up in the taxi. We had debated, when packing for the trip, whether or not we needed to bring a change of clothes for him. Given that it was just a day trip we decided that extra clothes would just be extra hassle to carry. He has been sick for a couple of weeks with a sinus infection that recently relocated to his chest/throat, but he hasn't been having any stomach problems at all. Boy, were we surprised. On the plus side, it did convince the driver to go faster.

We arrived at the train station, smelling of sour milk and wet-wiping each other's clothes as best we could, at 6:55am. I grabbed all the bags and the folded up stroller (the week before Chinese New Year the crowds at any train station in China are a concrete example of what 1.4 billion people actually look like - no chance of actually using the stroller there) and my wife paid the fare (plus a bit for the puke) and grabbed the baby. We then proceeded to, as they say, "haul ass". We made the train with almost a minute to spare.

In a rare moment of clarity and intelligence we had opted to take the new(ish) high-speed train from Hangzhou to Shanghai. According to the display at the front of the car we were soon cruising along at a speed of 308km per hour. The trip, which used to take more than 2 hours, now takes 50 minutes. I love that train.

Upon arriving in Shanghai we unfolded the stroller and wandered around looking for an open ticketing window. After a time we found one and stood in line behind 1.8 billion people to buy our return tickets for that afternoon. The consulate was only open until noon, so we bought return tickets for 1pm. Tickets purchased, we grabbed a quick bite of breakfast. As a bit of advice, the Chinese KFC version of a sausage and egg McMuffin has all of the weaknesses of the North American McDonald's version (the sausage and the egg, primarily) with the added detriment of not even being on a muffin - they use a regular bun. Gross.

Now fed and ticketed, we made our way to the subway terminal that connects to the train station. We only had to go 8 stops, but in those 8 stops I learned that Shanghai's subway system is clean, efficient, and, at 8:30am on a Wednesday - very, very crowded. We managed to get off at the correct stop, however, and made our way up to street level where we remembered that it was raining.

I would like to pause here to point something out. Tyler usually gets up at 8am. Here it was, 9am, and we'd already been on the road for 3 hours. He'd been gotten up 2 hours early and had puked in a taxi, but my stuffed-up, coughing, sleepy little 14 month old was his usual cheerful self. On the train he sat quietly and ate a bit of apple, and on the subway he held on to the pole with me so we wouldn't fall over when the train stopped (giggling the whole way), and now he was pointing at and calling our attention to the sights of Shanghai as we tried to hold an umbrella over his stroller and walk at the same time.

Note: I didn't take this picture. This is from the portrait studio we went to about a month ago.

After a few minutes of trying to determine which direction the Canadian Consulate was from our subway stop, we'd had enough of the rain and the crowds and hailed a taxi. We knew it was only a few blocks, but we weren't sure which blocks and didn't want to wander aimlessly.

I truly don't want to re-live the ordeal at the consulate, so I won't go into details. I will say that handing in two applications involved standing in a rather long line three separate times and took almost 4 hours. Also, they keep the temperature in the consulate at a balmy 27 or 28°C, which would be fine except that it was about 6°C outside and most places in this part of China leave the windows open year round, so you tend to dress accordingly (in many warm layers). We roasted. Tyler spent the 4 hours wandering around (with his mother) and saying hello to strangers, and playing with my car keys. We left the Consulate, papers properly filed, at 12:48pm - 12 minutes before the departure of our train.

Knowing we had no chance of making that train, we walked back to the subway entrance (now that we knew where it was). Tyler had fallen asleep in the elevator at the consulate, and napped in his stroller until we got on the subway train. We rode the 8 stops back to the train station with the 2.4 billion other people who were also riding the subway in Shanghai that day, sitting in the seat that an old lady had shamed someone into giving up for us. Tyler spent the whole time telling the old lady a story (he can't really talk yet, but he doesn't let that stop him).

Once at the train station we stood in line behind the 3 billion other people at the ticket window to change our tickets to a later train. We didn't have time to catch the 2 o'clock train so we opted for the 3 o'clock. We grabbed some lunch in a little restaurant in the train station, and Tyler played a game of "funny face/giggle" with the waitresses. All of them. I don't think anyone else was served food the whole time we were there.

We made the train with plenty of time to spare, and Tyler spent a large portion of the 50 minute journey playing peek-a-boo with the lady across the aisle. Once back in Hangzhou, we stood in line at the taxi stand behind approximately 9 billion people. Tyler spent the wait finding litter to point at and say "臭"(chou="stinky"). Traffic was lighter than we expected on the way back to my sister-in-law's place, and we arrived shortly before 5pm - almost 11 hours after we'd left. After supper, an hour or so of "chase-auntie-with-balloons" and a bath he almost lasted through the first two verses of "Baby Beluga" before falling soundly asleep for the night.

While it is true that after our very long day Tyler slept through until 8:30 the next morning, woke up enough to drink a bottle of formula and then went back to sleep until noon, it should be noted that he made it through the entire ordeal without crying, fussing, and without a single temper tantrum. Like I said, my son is awesome.

Introductions Are In Order

It's odd, isn't it?

This is the my first post on my shiny, new blog, I have no readers at the time of this writing, and yet still I feel the need to introduce myself. The process is further complicated by the fact that I really don't have any clear idea to whom I am making the introduction. I have some ideas about the purpose and direction of my little corner of the internet, but nothing firm, and certainly nothing set in stone. So, I really have no idea who you are, future reader.

As you might have seen in the brief bio I've included in my profile information, I have numerous hobbies, and have had several very different career paths over the years. As often as possible, the two areas overlap. I've been teaching English in mainland China since 2004, I've appeared in several Chinese television shows (some of which even aired), my wife and I ran our own (delivery-only) bakery/restaurant for a year and change, and we have just recently opened our own English training school. I expect I'll be using this blog to write about some of those experiences from time to time.

In addition to starting the new school, I am also trying my hand at becoming a professional writer of fiction. I'm elbows deep in the creation of one novel and a collection of short stories at the moment, and hope to self-publish both of them as e-books before the end of the year. I will likely be using this blog (and as many other channels as I can find) as a promotional tool for my writing, and as a way of (hopefully) building a fan base. I would love nothing more than to be able to make a living by writing novels.

Finally, I will be using this space to talk about some of my hobbies, and some of the things I've learned to do in order to make life in China livable. In the past seven years I've had to learn how to make a lot of things from scratch, simply because they aren't available here (or are very hard to come by). I'll likely be sharing some of that know-how for those who are interested.

I've titled this blog My Lived-in Life, because that is what I strive to have, and what I plan to share with you - a life that, like the old family homestead, has been thoroughly lived-in.

Mike