There is some weird stuff here.
The most popular form of transportation is the motor bike. Most people have one and they pile on everything in ingenious ways. It is not unusual to see someone with a TV, five gallon bottles of water, almost anything tooling around taking something home or for a commercial delivery.
Motorbikes and bicycles. On the bicycles, particularly on this campus at Jimei, kids are always hopping on someone’s bike getting rides. They either sit on the small flat luggage carrier over the rear wheel, or stand over the rear wheel on extenders on the axle that leave just enough room for a smallish Chinese foot. Nobody I have seen does the handlebar trick, which may be a practice abandoned due to bad experiences.
Traffic here and the ways and wisdom of driving protocol is a hoot. The rule is that first gets the right-of-way, no matter the vehicle, lane, intersection, whatever. If you’re first, you win and if you get hit, it’s their fault. This idea kind of makes rear-view mirrors superfluous……………….everybody focuses ahead of them, maneuvering to get there first. What happens behind them ain’t their problem.
So except for within Xiamen proper, where tooting your horn is outlawed, the deal is you blow your vehicle horn continuously and go like hell. It makes for quite a racket but surprisingly few accidents. And the protocol applies to pedestrians, most of whom have no horn, so they are non-competitive with any sort of vehicle from semis to bikes. It is not unusual for a motorbike or a car to go barreling along a pathway, jammed with kids going between classes, blowing it’s horn madly and bothering not a bit for people who may be in the roadway. Pedestrians seem to get it and move, some barely in time. Deaf Chinese aren’t very plentiful, which probably is a result of Darwin’s observations and flattened people with bad hearing.
Despite some pretty bad air pollution that takes the sharpness and clarity out of the picture of anything in these parts, things are pretty clean. In Xiamen and elsewhere, there are streetsweepers everywhere, people that is, with bamboo shafted leafy branches sweeping up leaves, trash and anything else. The efficiency of leafy tree branches in sweeping is remarkable. They used to use straw brooms the same way in Paris when I first traveled there. In later years the Parisian’s replaced the natural material with plastic that is supposed to resemble straw or twigs or something. Here, they stick with the natural stuff and it seems to work better.
There are also more conventional streetwashers, tank trucks that drive around the city spraying high pressure water to clean the streets. The unusual part about this process is that the trucks are equipped with amplified speakers and play “Happy Birthday” in a high-pitched single horn rendition that is startling, but instructive. I have no clue as to why they’d pick “Happy Birthday” as the streetwasher song, but if you are in Xiamen and hear the strained refrain of “Happy Birthday” you will know to step lively and avoid a soaking.
Nevertheless, the food is plentiful, really cheap and very, very good.
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