Nothing like traffic to make you go, "Oh yeah, I'm in CHINA!"
And I don't know another way to start this entry.
Everyday around 4:40pm, the school van arrives with Don, the driver, and Alex, Matt and Mya from the Branch 2 school. The van comes and whisks away all those carefree teachers who don't teach Kindergarten at 4:45pm. Matthew, Lisa and I enjoy teaching Kindergarten four days a week while Litisha teaches twice a week. Because we are guaranteed a ride home if we didn't teach Kindergarten, the school worked out a system where we'd take taxis home and be reimbursed at the end of each month. This was a fine plan until we realized that shift-change occurs right around 5:30pm, which is when we'd be looking for a ride home. The first day after teaching, we spent twenty minutes watching empty taxi after empty taxi drive right past us on its way to headquarters to hand off the vehicle to the next shift driver. Wuhan has shift-change for taxis during the one time when all taxis should be running and we can only surmise that the shift-change is a passive-aggressive nod towards taking public transportation and thus potentially relieving the roads a bit.
But I say, if all those taxis are running around town EMPTY during rush hour, it isn't doing anyone a bit of good. So we complained (which I feel horrible about now as you shall see) and the school told us they would "employ" a driver or drivers to take us home each day. The drivers turned out to be the poor teachers who happened to have cars. The first week, Lisa, Matt and I squnched ourselves into the back of an immaculate tan sedan, brand name Chery, I believe, and acted as foreign interlopers in the evening play called, "Hi, honey, how was your day? Oh, and please don't mind the three foreigners in the back seat!" The teacher in charge of depositing us at the South Lake branch school is also the mother of a boy in my K2 class - Leo. He is a little hell-raiser, but not in class, only around his mother and father. Dad drives and Leo sits on mom's lap. No one wears a seatbelt. There is a giant stuffed teddy bear in the back seat that sits on Matt's lap and I usually am stuck in the center seat even though Lisa is a third my size. Sitting where I do, I get to watch the actions of the play unfold. Leo fidgets on mom's lap and gets his hands on dad's cell phone. At first his hands are slapped and then he pursues the gearshift so the cell phone becomes a happy distraction. After he takes three photos of dad driving with the phone, he accidentally calls dad's boss and shouts "I'm happy and I know it!" before hanging up on him. To which dad silently curses and mom claps, saying, "Oh Leo, good English!" Having sat in on this drama for eight or nine rides now, we all seem pretty comfortable with the routine, but maybe dad put his foot down because tonight we were handed off to my Kindergarten co-teacher, Mrs. Zhen.
Mrs. Zhen is an extremely perky woman in her mid-fifties with short, spiky black hair and a penchant for playing the piano just a hair "off". She wears her cell phone in a holder strapped to her wrist and undoes the Velcro protector at least fifty times during class to see what time it is. She is very friendly during class but becomes a tad efficient (read: abrupt) as soon as we leave the classroom. This evening, she smushed Litisha, Lisa and I in the back seat of her car with Matt up front in the passenger seat. Then she tooted the horn eighty or ninety times as we approached the school gate and sat quietly as a sea of parents waded past the car on the left and right as soon as the gate was opened.
The second we made it to the street - Jiefang Lu - it was bumper to bumper and not your usual traffic jam. We could all see something big had happened. Yesterday, in fact, we saw two different accidents which appeared to have had little impact on the flow of traffic, so we thought something really big had happened today. Let me try and set the scene:
Four exhausted foreigners in a stranger's car. The stranger may or may not speak English beyond "I'm happy!" or "I'm angry!". The foreigners are hungry and have been through a full day of teaching, not to mention a show-lesson and a lecture given by the local police. The windows are down and foul car air blows in and on the foreigners, none of whom are quite used to the feeling of ick that grows throughout a day in polluted Wuhan proper. Horns bellow and scooters zip pass, brakes screeching and in dire need of a squirt or two of WD40. So now that you're here with me, you might appreciate this joke, but maybe you won't. And, try not to forget that the foreigners are hopped up on fructose, what with the massive quantities of banana, orange and melon ingested during the police lecture.
Matt leans back and tells us he's thinking of buying a scooter, except he calls it a "scoot". I ask if he wants to get a real scooter or one with pedals for pedal power. He responds that he'd like to get the real deal since he's been informed that you don't need license plates to own a scooter in the city. I tell him he should invest in vanity plates nonetheless. Litisha inquires as to what should be on the plates. She offers, "Waiguo", which means literally, "Outside country" and is used to denote anything foreign. To this, I respond, "What about: Waiguo when you can scoot."
Get it? We laughed for about fifteen minutes and although I was in tears, it could have been from the dust blowing in the windows and the black smoke pumping in from the exhaust pipe that was eye level from the huge truck to our right. We managed to inch along for 35 minutes, putting just three long blocks in between us and the school. In fact, we could have walked home in that amount of time, or at least, I could have.
And what was the big malfunction creating all the standstill? A freshly laid cement trench of approximately 6 feet in length on the right side of the road. We were flabbergasted. But that wasn't even the coup d'etat. Once we got to the major road that won't allow left turns, the crush of humanity was almost absurd. Mrs. Zhen had lost all decorum and plowed through along with the best of them, but even she was stopped for almost ten straight minutes watching in disbelief as every type of conveyance made its way into our path. Buses that were taller than they were long, trucks that were as wide as two lanes of traffic and as greasy and dirty and dank as the bottom of an oil well, shiny black cars that seemed to be reflecting the importance of those entombed inside, taxis so dented and rusty that they were like junk-yard zombies, pedicabs, bicycles, pedal-scooters, electric scooters, motorcycles, wooden carts on rickety metal wheels, ovens and stoves with bicycle wheels attached to the sides being pulled by rope, moving barrels of slop from the backs of restaurants lurching along as slow as the ooze running down the barrel sides, women with strollers, pushing the strollers and hence their babies out into traffic first, thinking a driver might be a little more careful around a stroller, and it goes on and on. The point is that every type of vehicle was on the road at exactly the same time tonight and Mrs. Zhen's little red sedan was no match for them. We made it home in just over an hour and I'm sure Mrs. Zhen will call in sick tomorrow, if even it is the first time in her whole career. Tonight's drive surely took five years off of her life, alone.
