If Wuhan was any indication of what the rest of central China will be like, I’m going to stick to the coastal cities for the majority of my intracountry travels.
I found Wuhan to be a place with not much to do for foreigners. And if there was a place you wanted to go, it’ll take you a long time to get there due to the heavy traffic within the city limits. Why city planners felt that three and four laned traffic circles where major thoroughfares connect was a good idea just flabbergasts me.
While the local people were rather friendly, my command of Mandarin is still lacking which made even simple tasks difficult. For example, after catching the wrong bus back from a team dinner and being dropped off at a hotel where I was not staying, trying to command a taxi was not easy nor was ensuring the correct destination was understood by the driver. (Don’t worry, I did sleep where I was supposed to that night so this adventure has a happy ending to it.)
You hear tales and see pictures of cities where there are neighborhoods of new buildings in all states of completion but no one lives in them, making entire square miles ghostowns. I’ve now experienced this first hand and can say it’s rather creepy weird. There’s only so much truth to the phrase “If you build it, they will come” before you just build too much and there’s no one left who’s coming. Yeah, Wuhan.
A great read
No, I’m not talking about a read as in playing poker, though I did clean up quite well on the train ride back to Suzhou from Wuhan today! But rather, I’m talking about a book my friend Gregg Chavaria published a year and a half ago. His story, My Journey to Meet Jane Goodall, has many similar parallels to what’s going on in my life these days and did, to a rather large extent, help me decide upon taking this chance to move to China and see what life has in store for me.
As the holidays are approaching, consider buying this book as a gift for yourself or others. It’s an easy, good read and provides insight not only into the life of a impressive man finding his way in life but also adds an air of familiarity to one of the greatest researchers and scientists of our time. Somehow Chavaria is able to make it seems like you, the reader, are there with him and Jane Goodall in a way that you all become friends!