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posted Tuesday, 21 December 2004
Yesterday, I did something rather rash. I know it's a bad habit, but where would we be if we didn't occasionally do something wild and crazy? It's not something I do often and I'm sure it's not habit forming.
In a moment of madness, I decided to take a bus! Not a special long distance bus. Just a local bus. The internet is full of horror stories about 24 hour bus journeys (Wimps! I've done 36!), but there is next to nothing about regular city buses. So, in the interests of balance, I ventured off.
For reasons too tedious to go into, I had to drag myself to the outskirts of the city and had the choice of a ¥40 taxi ride or a ¥1.50 bus ride. Mindful of the need to preserve beer coupons, I opted for the latter.
This involved taking a 15 minute walk from home to the terminus of the No. 3 bus. It appears that buses do not routinely pop by your house to pick you up, nor can you call one.
When I arrive the terminus is empty, so I sit in the shade of a tree and happily watch the world go by. There are not many people about for my favourite activity of people watching , but to my intense joy the "Happy Birthday" truck rolls by spraying everything with water. After about five minutes, an empty bus rolls up and I stroll across clutching my ¥1.50. Just as I approach the door, 200 people materialise from thin air and attempt to board the bus all at the same time. Old ladies, young children and dozy foreigners are cast to the ground and trampled underfoot.
As I scrape myself up and pick asphalt out of my hair, I notice something strange. One group of people is hanging back, making no attempt to board the bus, but throwing their belongings through the windows. ( I have, in the countryside, seen people throw themselves through the windows, but it is apparently not the custom here.)
Ignoring them, I sharpen my elbows and enter the fray around the door. Eventually, the sheer pressure of people behind me pops me through the door and I find myself banging into a woman staring at the little box into which we are required to drop our fare. From the expression on her face, it seems that she has never entertained the notion that she is required to stump up her hard earned for the privilege of travelling with us. She fumbles around looking for her purse, examines every note she possesses, then finally shoves them all back into her pocket. Then she pulls a handful of coins from another pocket and donates them to the fund, completely oblivious to the 150 people waiting behind her.
I pay with the cash I have been holding in readiness since leaving home and then I look for a seat. To my amazement there are several free seats! However, none of the dozens of people in front of me are claiming them.
I have learned over the years that the best way to get on around here is to observe carefully what everyone else does, deduce the cultural expectations and norms, accept the differences, then do what you were going to do anyway. So, I choose a nice seat with a right hand view - my preference. I'm just about to sit down when I notice that there is a bag on the seat. In fact all the unclaimed seats are littered with the belongings thrown through the window. It seems that to claim a seat, all you have to do is occupy it in some symbolic form.
After all the scrum at the door have been squeezed in, the belonging throwers stroll on and take up their rightful positions. Then come the little old ladies, babes in arms etc. Immediately, the people who battled remorselessly for a seat, the very people who trampled the elderly and the innocent underfoot, gallantly rise up and kindly offer their seats to the more deserving! It seems that the object is not to acquire a seat after all, but to gain face by being one of the first onto the bus.
Now I come to a little known fact about the Chinese language. Chinese has no word for 'full'. Actually, that is completely untrue, but the concept of fullness does not apply to buses. Bus drivers have 'fullness' surgically removed from their consciousnesses and traces of the word 'full' erased.
More and more latecomers squeeze on until we are all crushed together in conditions which the average sardine would take serious offence to. There are people with huge bags, people with carrying poles bearing two huge sacks of whatever, people with television sets, stereoplayers, microwave ovens etc. I kid you not.
(Once, I was on a bus which broke down. After several attempts to restart it, the driver told everyone to get off and wait for the next one. Sixty-plus people stood at the side of the road and waited. The next bus was 'full' with its own complement of sixty-plus but we all squeezed on somehow! The buses seat about 35 people.)
Anyway, the driver finally decides that there is a nice cup of tea waiting for him at the other end of the route and shuts the door. Then opens it again as a man rushes up yelling. He climbs on, says 'wait a minute' and points along the road to where his wife is strolling towards us, doing a bit of window shopping at the same time. We all wait patiently until she decides against buying a new hat in that shade of green and wanders over to join us. Then we are off.
The bus screeches, shudders and groans but moves. The vast majority of passenger are standing and grab onto anything that looks relatively solid. Then it begins. The noise. There is nothing like the noise in a Chinese bus. I am near the back of the bus and the woman beside me decides to strike up a conversation with her companion. Unfortunately her companion is at the front of the bus. They can't even see each other, but gaily yell back and forward about the outrageous price of beansprouts in the market this week. Several people around join in with their shopping woes. Of course, not everyone is interested in this topic, so they start their own alternative conversations.
Just then someone's mobile phone rings. Every last person on the bus (including me) checks their phone (even though the ring tone is nothing like mine). About half the people yell "wei" into their handsets just in case and eventually we sort out who has really received a call. We are then entertained as the lucky chap screams into his phone all the details of his plans for the next half hour. This consists of one sentence over and over again. "I'm on the bus!" Well as Ken Kesey said, "You are either On the Bus or Off the Bus."
All this racket is overlaid by the bus itself as its prerecorded announcements inform us that we are on the correct bus, which stop is next, which stop we have just missed, which connections we can make here etc. It also advices us to take care and helpfully yells out "Bus No. 3" every time it stops.
Slowly, slowly, we make our way through the city and into the suburbs. the driver stops at every designated stop, whether or not anyone is waiting to get on or off. Gradually the crowd thins slightly, although it seems that most people are along for the full ride. Either that or it is only the people who are in the immediate vicinity of the door who are able to get off. Fortunately, I am going to the last stop, so I don't have to worry about getting off! (Actually, this is a new development. Until recently the last stop was also the first for the return journey. The bus would arrive laden with passengers, to be greeted by a baying mob attempting to get onto the bus before the arrivals had disembarked.)
At the stop before last, the person sitting nearest me gets off and I am able to rest my weary bones for three minutes. The bus informs us that this is the last stop and cheerfully bids us "Goodbye!"
I think I'll get a taxi back.
(On a more serious note, in 2000 a Liuzhou bus carrying 78 passengers plunged from a bridge and fell 27 metres into the river. There were no survivors. The precise cause of the accident remains controversial, but the official version is that the bus was attempting to avoid some debris left behind by workers repairing the road surface. Indeed a number of road workers were subsequently imprisoned. The families of the victims have never accepted this verdict and still hold regular protests at the spot where the accident occurred. Many of the victims were students of Guangxi Engineering College returning to the school after spending the evening celebrating the end of term.
I remain convinced that overloading and Chinese drivers' habit of putting the gears into neutral when at cruising speed contributed. If the bus had to swerve, there is no way that the brakes alone could stop the bus quickly in an emergency. I cringe every timeI see them do this.)
In a moment of madness, I decided to take a bus! Not a special long distance bus. Just a local bus. The internet is full of horror stories about 24 hour bus journeys (Wimps! I've done 36!), but there is next to nothing about regular city buses. So, in the interests of balance, I ventured off.
For reasons too tedious to go into, I had to drag myself to the outskirts of the city and had the choice of a ¥40 taxi ride or a ¥1.50 bus ride. Mindful of the need to preserve beer coupons, I opted for the latter.
This involved taking a 15 minute walk from home to the terminus of the No. 3 bus. It appears that buses do not routinely pop by your house to pick you up, nor can you call one.
When I arrive the terminus is empty, so I sit in the shade of a tree and happily watch the world go by. There are not many people about for my favourite activity of people watching , but to my intense joy the "Happy Birthday" truck rolls by spraying everything with water. After about five minutes, an empty bus rolls up and I stroll across clutching my ¥1.50. Just as I approach the door, 200 people materialise from thin air and attempt to board the bus all at the same time. Old ladies, young children and dozy foreigners are cast to the ground and trampled underfoot.
As I scrape myself up and pick asphalt out of my hair, I notice something strange. One group of people is hanging back, making no attempt to board the bus, but throwing their belongings through the windows. ( I have, in the countryside, seen people throw themselves through the windows, but it is apparently not the custom here.)
Ignoring them, I sharpen my elbows and enter the fray around the door. Eventually, the sheer pressure of people behind me pops me through the door and I find myself banging into a woman staring at the little box into which we are required to drop our fare. From the expression on her face, it seems that she has never entertained the notion that she is required to stump up her hard earned for the privilege of travelling with us. She fumbles around looking for her purse, examines every note she possesses, then finally shoves them all back into her pocket. Then she pulls a handful of coins from another pocket and donates them to the fund, completely oblivious to the 150 people waiting behind her.
I pay with the cash I have been holding in readiness since leaving home and then I look for a seat. To my amazement there are several free seats! However, none of the dozens of people in front of me are claiming them.
I have learned over the years that the best way to get on around here is to observe carefully what everyone else does, deduce the cultural expectations and norms, accept the differences, then do what you were going to do anyway. So, I choose a nice seat with a right hand view - my preference. I'm just about to sit down when I notice that there is a bag on the seat. In fact all the unclaimed seats are littered with the belongings thrown through the window. It seems that to claim a seat, all you have to do is occupy it in some symbolic form.
After all the scrum at the door have been squeezed in, the belonging throwers stroll on and take up their rightful positions. Then come the little old ladies, babes in arms etc. Immediately, the people who battled remorselessly for a seat, the very people who trampled the elderly and the innocent underfoot, gallantly rise up and kindly offer their seats to the more deserving! It seems that the object is not to acquire a seat after all, but to gain face by being one of the first onto the bus.
Now I come to a little known fact about the Chinese language. Chinese has no word for 'full'. Actually, that is completely untrue, but the concept of fullness does not apply to buses. Bus drivers have 'fullness' surgically removed from their consciousnesses and traces of the word 'full' erased.
More and more latecomers squeeze on until we are all crushed together in conditions which the average sardine would take serious offence to. There are people with huge bags, people with carrying poles bearing two huge sacks of whatever, people with television sets, stereoplayers, microwave ovens etc. I kid you not.
(Once, I was on a bus which broke down. After several attempts to restart it, the driver told everyone to get off and wait for the next one. Sixty-plus people stood at the side of the road and waited. The next bus was 'full' with its own complement of sixty-plus but we all squeezed on somehow! The buses seat about 35 people.)
Anyway, the driver finally decides that there is a nice cup of tea waiting for him at the other end of the route and shuts the door. Then opens it again as a man rushes up yelling. He climbs on, says 'wait a minute' and points along the road to where his wife is strolling towards us, doing a bit of window shopping at the same time. We all wait patiently until she decides against buying a new hat in that shade of green and wanders over to join us. Then we are off.
The bus screeches, shudders and groans but moves. The vast majority of passenger are standing and grab onto anything that looks relatively solid. Then it begins. The noise. There is nothing like the noise in a Chinese bus. I am near the back of the bus and the woman beside me decides to strike up a conversation with her companion. Unfortunately her companion is at the front of the bus. They can't even see each other, but gaily yell back and forward about the outrageous price of beansprouts in the market this week. Several people around join in with their shopping woes. Of course, not everyone is interested in this topic, so they start their own alternative conversations.
Just then someone's mobile phone rings. Every last person on the bus (including me) checks their phone (even though the ring tone is nothing like mine). About half the people yell "wei" into their handsets just in case and eventually we sort out who has really received a call. We are then entertained as the lucky chap screams into his phone all the details of his plans for the next half hour. This consists of one sentence over and over again. "I'm on the bus!" Well as Ken Kesey said, "You are either On the Bus or Off the Bus."
All this racket is overlaid by the bus itself as its prerecorded announcements inform us that we are on the correct bus, which stop is next, which stop we have just missed, which connections we can make here etc. It also advices us to take care and helpfully yells out "Bus No. 3" every time it stops.
Slowly, slowly, we make our way through the city and into the suburbs. the driver stops at every designated stop, whether or not anyone is waiting to get on or off. Gradually the crowd thins slightly, although it seems that most people are along for the full ride. Either that or it is only the people who are in the immediate vicinity of the door who are able to get off. Fortunately, I am going to the last stop, so I don't have to worry about getting off! (Actually, this is a new development. Until recently the last stop was also the first for the return journey. The bus would arrive laden with passengers, to be greeted by a baying mob attempting to get onto the bus before the arrivals had disembarked.)
At the stop before last, the person sitting nearest me gets off and I am able to rest my weary bones for three minutes. The bus informs us that this is the last stop and cheerfully bids us "Goodbye!"
I think I'll get a taxi back.
(On a more serious note, in 2000 a Liuzhou bus carrying 78 passengers plunged from a bridge and fell 27 metres into the river. There were no survivors. The precise cause of the accident remains controversial, but the official version is that the bus was attempting to avoid some debris left behind by workers repairing the road surface. Indeed a number of road workers were subsequently imprisoned. The families of the victims have never accepted this verdict and still hold regular protests at the spot where the accident occurred. Many of the victims were students of Guangxi Engineering College returning to the school after spending the evening celebrating the end of term.I remain convinced that overloading and Chinese drivers' habit of putting the gears into neutral when at cruising speed contributed. If the bus had to swerve, there is no way that the brakes alone could stop the bus quickly in an emergency. I cringe every timeI see them do this.)
comments (3)
1. a reader left...
Friday, 31 December 2004 3:31 pm
thanks for your vivid description of being sandwiched in a Liuzhou bus. if
you'd ever take a train in spring festival，that will surely impress you
much more.
2. liuzhou left...
Friday, 31 December 2004 6:12 pm
I once took a train in Spring Festival. About eight years ago. Never again.
Now, at Spring Festival, I hibernate.
3. Princehahaha left...
Wednesday, 12 October 2005 7:08 pm
The Spring Festival is a piece of cake compared to the 70s when all the
trains were free for 'Red Guards' during the Cultrual Revolution. My dad
was a 'Red Guard', he told me people even sleep on the baggage rack on the
train.