Lunar New Year - China attacks the senses

Last week I had the pleasure of travelling by coach from Hong Kong to Shantou to stay with relatives over the new year period. The border crossing is quite something with no metal-detecting arch for people and an optional x-ray scanner for luggage. Also, it seems that a RHS driven coach doesn't detract from driving quality in a LHS drive system.

After exiting the coach, Shantou, China stimulates the senses in several ways:

• The air is surprisingly reasonable after being in Hong Kong for a few weeks
• It's noisy - horns are used unsparingly, quite like how children use bicycle bells. Consumer fireworks make noise and then cause car/bike/scooter alarms to go off.
• It's bright - useless lights show off wealth, but also flood the night sky such that stars cannot be viewed. And again with the random fireworks.
• The place does feel rough and unmaintained. There's vision impairment tracks along the footpath but the footpath itself is uneven and there are huge gaps between the footpath and the elevated shopfronts.
• The taste of the food is much more to my liking.

 

My uncle's home was quite cosy... here my smallest cousin doesn't look too impressed at my uncle taking the random picture. Also note the ridiculously small teacups - managing and drinking from these can kill a lot of time, even with only intermittent conversation. I think it helps with under/unemployment in Shantou.

Here's grandma. Note my uncle's place is on the sixth floor with no lift.  We managed to talk about stuff in Mandarin, although she got some tones mixed up once or twice. Everyone watched 'the show' on the night and I helped uncle pull the song off QQ news so he could practice singing it. >.<

Number Two trying to enjoy GTA2 with little English and the Chinese way of driving. He took the laneways and drove the wrong way up highways, but wanted to stop at traffic lights. A start eh? Hmmm
The Chinese also kindly blocked Facebook, Blogger/Blogspot, Youtube, Picasa web and Google documents. Very kind of them except I actually wanted to wanted to waste time.

Here's some cool consumer fireworks - apologies for not making up my mind about the orientation earlier.

Usually thrown individually.

Launcher reuse for mini-rockets.

Anyway, onwards to another matter - Chinese traffic.

I've found that Chinese traffic doesn't paralyse at an incident in town - they just go around it as usual as they weave and come from all different directions (there's no uniformity to turning from one major road to another like how we have an arc marked out). However, their dodgy ways causes trouble on the expressway. When traffic slows down for some reason [requiring an ambulance], traffic fans out to three lanes. That's not really helpful for the emergency services who need to get there with haste to clean up the mess.
My coach had tried to overtake on the shoulder but had to merge back upon seeing a motorcycle. The same driver also got lost in Shenzhen and had to ask for directions. The second bus driver used his GPS which complained about the matter of speed.  A coach in Shenzhen tried to do a three-point turn on a three lane dual carriageway highway. Weird stuff.

There's also a rule of thumb for wet weather travel.

1. You may ride a bicycle and hold your own umbrella.
2. You may ride a scooter and have a second person hold an umbrella (or launch medium-sized fireworks on the go)