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Wuhan page 1 of Carter's China Trip |
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We were very happy our hosts were
there to get us through the station in Guangzhou. It was classic movie farecrowds
pushing against barricades trying to get through. Professor Guobin
Chi spoke to the right person and we were let
through while those not in our group were pushed back. We hurried, then waited, then we went down
a hallway by ourselves and soon emerged along a red, white and blue
train. We were not all in the same car. This was called a hard sleeper
train. We did not have private
compartments but slots with six bunks-three high with a walkway between. Mike and I had the lower bunks (we probably
paid more). Each bunk had a blanket
and a pillow. You crawled under the
blanket to take off your pants. In the middle bunks above were a
young couple traveling back to their home area to get married. With a great amount of effort, we had a
conversation in English. (I certainly
gained an appreciation for the fact that I speak English, but it is
embarrassing that I could not speak his language.) He was an engineer and she worked in the
factory. He had 20 days of vacation
and got another 10 days to get married.
It was going to take them more than two days to get home via the
train. Of course, there was hot water on
the train. The toilet in our car was
not western, but it did the job. Many
of the Chinese passengers brought dehydrated noodle dishes and fixed them by
pouring hot water into the container.
My dinner that night was a tray of goodies wrapped in cellophane. I ate selectively but it was adequate. We got to see some countryside that evening
before it got dark. We passed through
some low mountains. At 10:20 they
turned the lights out on the train. |
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Zoomed
map of area traveled in China. Red dots show cities visited. Red lines
show travel by bus and train. map modified from the CIA
Factbook web map of China |
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Friday started at 5:20 when they turned the lights on. We got off the train in Wuhan at about 6:00 and were met with colleagues from Wuhan University. I piled into a rather luxurious Toyota van with leather seats. They took us to the Lake View Garden Hotel where we got to eat breakfast and wash up. The lobby of this hotel was quite impressive. I tried out a chair appropriate to my rank. Two of our hosts waited for us under an intricately carved wall. The sleeping room was not so luxurious.
I shared a room with Pedro Martinez
from Cuba. Here was my opportunity to
practice Spanish. Pedro was not used
to speaking English and it had been years since I spoke Spanish. But we did fairly well. It was more a matter of phrases and words
than complete sentences. We had a breakfast buffet at the
hotel that was mostly western, but it was good. Of course, there was watermelon. At 9:00 we are off for a visit to Wuhan
University. It was here that I saw the
first traffic light with a display of numbers counting down the seconds until
the light would change to green. Wuhan University is a quality
university with a large program in the surveying and mapping sciences. I had corresponded with colleagues from
this University through the Map Use Commission. There are four campuses produced through a
recent consolidation of area universities. Here we learned that the faculty and
staff live in university apartments.
The higher your rank and the more senior you are, the larger your
apartment. Faculty members are not well
compensated in China. If you have enough money, I believe you can buy your own apartment. I never fully comprehended how housing is allocated and who can live where. Suffice it to say, it is not the American system with people living anywhere they want and then driving to work every day. You don’t see much space devoted to parking lots. This is another measure of how much less energy they consume and how we are locked into a system requiring that everyone have an automobile. At the University we had presentations on the software they have created. The prime product is GeoStar. This looks a lot like the popular ESRI software, ArcView and Arc/Info. Their package competes with the ESRI products, but GeoStar is not a rip-off of the other packages. Although I slept well on the train, I got hit with a wave of sleepiness this morning. This seems to have been my only jet lag problem and it came days after I got to China. |
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Continue to the next page in the sequence Return to the beginning of Carter's China travels Dr.
James R. Carter, Geography-Geology Department Illinois
State University jrcarter@ilstu.edu |
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