Spring is Good. Daymares are Bad.

Today's weather: High = 17 Low = 7
Sunny

After a whole week of this kind of weather, spring is officially here by the definition used in Shanghai. For that to happen, the average temperature must be above 10 degrees for 5 days in a row -- which it now has!

Spring / Fall --> average is between 10 and 20 degrees
Winter --> average is below 10 degrees
Summer --> average is above 20 degrees

The winter this year was brutally cold in January, in fact it set a record, but the cold was short-lived. Since most of us took off to the tropics during that time, we also weren't affected that much.

This is actually a better deal than last year where the chilly weather lingered until almost May. This year, it has been an extremely dry winter and the rains have not yet arrived. So the grass is very much parched brown.

Yesterday, a few of us Grade 12 teachers went with the students on a marathon field trip to celebrate their "becoming an adult" It was an interesting ceremony with emotional speeches, students reading letter from parents, great lunches, and a typical Chinese travel experience while being carted around in groups to see this "tourist attraction" and others.

Since they had to pick Wuxi as the location, which is 140km from Shanghai, it meant a long and arduous bus journey each way with the inevitable traffic congestion. About 3 hours each way for the commute. Add this to the Chinese sightseeing experience with crowds and delays, and the whole event from start-to-finish was 13 hours.

For goodness sake, next time please choose a location closer to the city center and avoid long-distance road travel. The frenetic growth of private cars is choking the life out of everyone else and making China travel a nightmare -- or should I say daymare. This turned what would have been an otherwise fun and interesting experience into one of those horrendously tedious all-day affairs that I have suffered about a dozen times in China. On average, I go through a daymare like this about once every year, connected to various events such as "banquets" with school officials, family-related affairs, weddings, or the most dreaded one of all: a weekend retreat.

Wuxi is one of countless newly-developed industrial towns in Jiangsu province that have basically transformed themselves in the last ten years. The model is the same. Tear down the old houses, put in apartments, shopping malls, and factories. Make the streets wide, throw in zillions of traffic lights, put up guardrails, hire police and guards to keep strict order, and ban motorcycles from the area.

Let's just say this is a Jiangsu province specialty, and all those newly industrialized cities near Shanghai are enjoying super rapid growth rates. They have the space to build the wider roads and larger buildings, as the population right in Shanghai would reduce such growth.

If you look at the list of cities that ban motorcycles, Jiangsu province takes the cake for having the highest number. In these cities, they enforce the ban greatly with police to back it up. This is evidenced by not seeing a single bike the entire time I go visit these places. Just a countless bunch of slow moving e-bikes and private cars. Yuck. Not my kind of province.

I'll take the big city any day.