Traffic in Shenyang - The Players. Part 1.

For a couple of months now I´m owning a little electric scooter. Those became more and more popular here in China in the last couple of years, as they are pretty cheap (even a migrant worker can afford one spending a month`s wage), of course more comfortable as a bicycle and during rush hour the quickest way to get through town. Mine`s a pretty basic model and with 40 km/h and a range of about 35 km sufficient for a cruise through this huge city.

So now I´m one among millions swarming through the city every day on their rides to get to work, home or anywhere else. On bigger roads scooters and bicycles have their own lanes, and in Shenyang almost every road is big. And if not, you just ride on the sidewalks, as you`re officially not allowed to drive on the road along with cars. Not that anyone really cared. But on a scooter you´re mainly surrounded by other cyclists or scooters, so this post revolves all around the interesting and to the eye of a western beholder somewhat strange encounters in this chaotic world of Shenyang city traffic.

Shenyang cyclists can be categorized in mainly three categories according to what purpose they use their bike or scooter for - I identified civilians, transporters and officials.

Civilians

 The "civilian" cyclist is defined by not using his ride to work or earn money with it, mainly by transporting stuff, but for private means, mainly getting someplace. Pretty obvious, I guess.

Most of them are normal,ordinary, not worh mentioning cyclists and scooter riders, but there are also lots of interesting subspecies, e.g.


Dementors

I named this kind of cyclists after their resemblance to this ghost-like beings from the Harry Potter movies. They also wear veil and you can`t see their faces.

The Shenyang Dementor is exclusively female and middle-aged. They wear this to protect their faces from strong winds, insects, dust and the sun. And pose a threat to everyone else as I highly doubt you can see really clearly through those "curtains", be they transparent or not.

Space (Wo-)men

Mostly middle-aged women like the Dementors, they use a different method to protect their faces from dust and sun -  huge caps with "sun glasses" that work like a car`s wind shield and cover the whole face, giving them somewhat the appearance of astronauts or futuristic 70ies science fiction movies or 80ies music videos.

Family Trips

 The last subspecies is something you probably encounter in a lot of other Asian countries too - the "a-whole-bunch-of-people-on-a-single-tiny-bike"-category. Of course we have`em here in Shenyang, too. You sometimes wonder why people travel like this, especially when children are involved, but the traffic safety awareness is still pretty low in China in general as real road safety education is rare - in cars for example children seats are not mandatory when transporting them, and besides the driver no one is obliged to wear safety belts. So of course on bikes you act as careless, as there is no law against doing so:

As always, those are only examples where I had my camera at hand and was quick enough to take a picture - you can encounter far worse here. And I must admit, as I was mostly riding my bike while taking these pictures, I became a huge traffic hazard myself because of course you might forget focussing on the road while huntig for that particular picture - or talking on the phone, what almost every Chinese does while driving or riding:

That`s it on the categories among "civilian" riders. Next blog post will be all about what Chinese transport how on bikes. Even more weird and risky and dangerous.

On the move.

This weekend, throughout the country the semester break starts and the students all over China start swarming back into their hometowns to be with their families for a couple of weeks.

 It´s like a smaller "Spring Festival", where normally half of China`s population is somehow on the move, mainly from bigger metropolitan areas to smaller home towns to visit old friend and mostly family. During semster break it`s "just" students, but their number has risen to almost 30.000.000 in the last ten years.

As a student in China, you don`t really have a choice where to live and stay during the semester - normally you get assigned a dormitory room  on campus that you have to share with other students - one at least, if you´re lucky, but mostly with three, five or even seven others. Even if your family lives in the city where you study, you have to live in a dorm on campus. Needless to say that all student dorms are seperated by gender and get locked and the electricity gets switched off at around 11 pm.

With almost all students living on campus, universities become small towns, surrounded by a wall, surrounded by a bigger city. A city in a city.

And if this city`s student inhabitants all want to leave at the same time, the campus infrastructure reaches its limits. So China postal services for example had to set up stalls on campus and work extra shifts to get all student`s mail and luggage checked in - still students had to line up in long queues:

Although one has to admit that Chinese almost never travel light - I sometimes have a feeling there`s a nation-wide three-bag-check-in-minimum:

As domestic flight services in China increase, it opens up a new possibility for students to get home conveniently and quickly. Domestic airlines know about their potential new customers and some of them, in this picture China Southern Air, even offer check-in on campus and try to attract new customers with raffling free tickets:

Under the bridge.

During summer, Chinese love to do stuff outside in the streets, parks, squares - or in this case even beneath a road overpass near our home. Wherever there`s enough space for a bigger bunch of people, because Chinese also like to do this stuff in a group, the bigger, the more, the better. And there has to be room for potential spectators,too.

It´s really one of the things I love about China - the social life is far more public and open. Whenever you walk, drive or ride through the city, at each corner you`ll find a group of Chinese playing, practicing or performing something. And to find out what you often have to get through a ring of spectators to find out. Makes moving through the city very interesting and exciting.

Well, what is that Chinese do in the streets? Or under the bridge?

For example:



traditional folk fan dance:

including live performed music to dance to:

 Don`t like fan dance? No problem - just cross a road and choose something else.

How about a little dance with little drums?

Or no Chinese folky dance at all? No problem.

What about ordinary, good old-fashioned aerobics?

Rope jumping?

Or no sports at all? How about a game of cards or Chinese chess with dozens of spectators commenting your every move?

There are  plenty more activities. And I haven`t even started on the food stalls yet. But I hope it´s enough for starters to get the picture - in summer, in China fun is open air.

Where better NOT to park your car in Shenyang.

A little advice: When in Shenyang, better avoid parking under bank branch signs on a windy day..... or else:

If the world would come to an end, it would probably be wet.

Last weekend we had one of the worst thunderstorms in years or even ever - at least that`s what several colleagues and students told us, and they should now, as some of them live here their whole life already.

It really had the darkest sky, the strongest winds and the heaviest rains I´ve ever experienced in China so far that day. Of course we stayed home, but could see the road from our window, people being unable to hold their umbrellas up or keep on their scooters or bicycles due to the wind, and wade or drive through knee-deep water on the road.

On some underpasses the water level obviously was far more critical, as you can see on the picture, taken by a friend not that far away from our apartment and put on weibo. We even heard a person drowned during the rain. Our condolences.

Maybe a good thing we could take out of this - the following day we had a BBQ on our rooftop and it started raining. And everybody was just happy it wasn`t as heavy a storm as the day before.....

Saving Inner Mongolia. At least a little bit.

Until about 60 years ago, Ke´erqin 科尔沁 in Inner Mongolia was covered with grass plains and smaller forests. Mongolian nomads were roaming through this area every now and then with their herds. Then they were forced (or "encouraged" ) to settle down by the Chinese government. China`s northeast has arid climate and strong winds, bringing in sand from the nearby Gobi desert, especially in spring. As the Mongolians (and Chinese) settled down, built villages, cultivated the land and raised and increased their herds, they used up too much of the scarce water, too many trees were cut down for firewood and construction, and the thin layers of fertile soil got blown away by the the desert winds and replaced by sand.

The result is the Ke´erqin "sandy land".

In fact a deforested (or "deplained" ) spot of land, but unlike a real desert it`s not too late yet to do something about it.

That`s where we came in - a group of about 40 people consisting of students of the Japanese language department and a handful of foreign teachers, spending a weekend for a, well, kind of a "infotainment action tour" to try to reverse the ongoing desertification of parts of Inner Mongolia at least a tiny little bit. And have fun while doing it.

Ke´erqin desert and the neighbouring town of Ganqika (甘旗卡) are about 300 km northwest from Shenyang, in the border region of the provinces Liaoning and Inner Mongolia. After a four hour busride
and "lunch on the bus" (see the following picture), we arrived at a section where for a couple of years now reforestation action is taken.

Every year a little more terrain is conquered back from the desert by planting long rows of young trees and ensuring the water supply for the dryest months of the year in spring. The coming year then more trees are planted in the neighbouring area.

So we had to walk through already reforested terrain for a while to get to the spot where we were supposed to plant new trees:

And then it`s just three more simple steps:

1. Take shovel, dig hole.

2. Put young tree in the hole, put soil back in the hole.

3. Give the little fella a good start by pouring a bucket of water over him.

Do this with a bunch of people and in about an hour you get already about 300 trees planted:

If these measures will do any good long-term and stop desertification in the area, I guess only time will tell. At least we tried. A little.

To get a feeling for how fertile the soil and the whole region once was and hopefully one day can be again, we made a stop at the only one hour away Daqinggou (大青沟) primeval forest, a habitat that could be preserved:

The next day it was time for the fun part - horse riding in the sandiest part of Ke´erqin desert. We were each equipped with a horse and a Mongolian guide and then took off for a one hour "stroll" through the dunes:

And for the atmospheric finish of this post, a single mongolian rider in the dunes:

How spring is made in Shenyang.

At the end of March we had the last snow here, and as I asked my students what they would call the season we are in right now last week, most of them answered "summer". And yes, they know the difference between "summer" ,"spring" and the other seasons in English (or German).

I`ve already heard a couple of times before from local Chinese that here there are only two "real" seasons here in Shenyang, summer and winter, with spring and fall beeing short four-week appendixes of the two former.

Well, I must admit temperatures rose quickly in April and since three weeks hit almost constantly 20 degrees and more during daytime, but still I´d call that spring. What astonished me at first was how fast all trees, plants and bushes in the city started to bud and blossom - about one week after the last snow falls the cherry trees were already in full bloom:

And about one week later the whole city was a lot greener - even at spots where I couldn`t remember having realized trees or something else nature-like standing there before.

Well, a couple of days later I solved this mystery - while passing a gang planting new, already green trees delivered by a huge truck on the roadside of a big alley:

The trees are brought in from forests and green houses outside of town or from further south in China, where spring isn`t just a four week season. And where winter doesn`t end at the end of March.

Well, we did our best to contribute to Shenyang getting greener with buying heaps of plants for our rooftop garden in the last couple of weeks - it has become a wonderful place to enjoy the gorgeous sunny weather these days - be it spring or summer.....