Kunitzer in China

Happy New Year! February 18 is the first day of the Chinese Year. It is a huge holiday here and a lot of people take extra vacation days to travel and visit friends and family. Friday, February 16 was especially quiet at work because all my Chinese colleagues had taken vacation days.

I had to travel to Shanghai on Tuesday February 13 for business. Normally I would take the train from Suzhou to Shanghai. Being so near to the Chinese New Year, all of the train tickets were sold out and I needed to take the bus. Even if I could get train tickets, my Chinese colleagues strongly advised me to not take the train because the trains and the train stations would be extremely crowded. I have taken the bus from Suzhou to Shanghai before, so this was not a problem for me. I can now tell the taxi driver that I need to go to the North Bus Station – “Qi Che Bei Zhan”. I can buy my own bus ticket at the train station – “Shanghai”. I can get my own tickets at the subway station to get to my company’s office – “Liu Jia Zui”. And I can even say these things with the correct tones. I’m a long way off from conversational Mandarin, but at least I can get around a little easier without having to carry a taxi book all the time.

The Shanghai trip went well, but I didn’t have to take the bus or the train back. I drove a car back. (One of my colleagues has a car and he is taking a vacation to Phillipines and he needed somebody to drive his car back to Suzhou from Shanghai. I also get free use of a car for about a week.) My first time driving in China and I needed to drive through the central business district in Shanghai. Fortunately, I had to work until about 8:30pm. Fortunately, I say, because the traffic starts to die down around 7:00pm. Besides, I didn’t want to get stuck in a traffic jam with 100,000 other cars all trying get through the tunnel to cross the Huangpu River. With my Shanghai map in my lap, I was able to make my way across town and I made it to the highway back to Suzhou without any problems. I made one wrong turn, but I was able to find a new route without any problem. It actually went a lot better than I thought it would. Sure, there were a lot of other cars, mopeds, bicycles and pedestrians on the street and sure most people didn’t follow the rules of the road, but traffic moves rather slowly (at least compared to USA) and as long as I used my horn and my turn signals I was able to pick my way across Shanghai without incident. I think I was more nervous about getting lost than I was about getting into an accident. Even though the driving really wasn’t a big problem, it did require a lot of attention and I still think it is better to use public transportation than to try driving myself. But that won’t stop me from using my colleague’s car for a week!

Saturday, February 17 was Chinese New Year’s Eve. I went to downtown Suzhou because there was going to be a dragon dance. I new it was going to be kind of a crazy day because I started hearing fireworks at about 9:00am. The more the day went on, the higher the frequency of fire works. At 9:00am , I could hear fireworks about 1x per 10 seconds. By 2:00pm, it was nearly continuous at 1x per second. After 5:00pm, I could here them going off all over the city at more than 10x per second. This lasted until well past midnight. These people are crazy about fireworks here. Everybody buys them. And these aren’t just sparklers and smoke bombs either – firecrackers, bottle rockets, Roman candles, cherry bombs all the way up to class A fireworks like we would see on 4th of July in USA. The most common fireworks I saw were class A fireworks and two kinds of firecrackers. It was really amazing to see these class A fireworks exploding all over the city. People would light them in the streets, in the apartment complexes, in the city center, in parks. Everywhere I went in the city, I could see these exploding 360 degrees around me. And with so many high buildings in Suzhou, the booms would echo all around. One kind of firecracker that was quite common was about 40mm diameter (~1.5 inch) and about 150mm long (~6 inch). People would set these on the ground, light the fuse and a miniature bomb would shoot about 10 meters (~30 feet) in the air. Right when it reached the apex, this miniature bomb would explode. Most of the time. A few times I saw these go not quite as high as normal, so the mini bomb fell back to the ground before it exploded. Strangely, these people knew this happened occasionally, but they almost never watched to see where the mini bomb went. A few times I saw these things fall less than 1 meter (~3 feet) from a person before it exploded. Even more strange, nobody I saw ever flinched when this happened. The other type of firecracker is the kind that is readily available in USA in those states that allow them. These are the king that are about 6mm diameter (~¼ inch) by about 40mm long (~1.5 inch). But in China, peole will usually buy these giant coils of more than 1000 firecrackers (each coil probably weighs about 5kg (~10 pounds) and will light several coils at a time. Some people would unwind thee coils and then put the long strips to form the number 888 – this is a lucky number in China and people do this to bring good luck in the new year. I bought about 15kg (~30pounds) of these firecrackers myself for only 50RMB (~US$8.50). Good price. Great fun!