Carrying Things and People

China is full of things which need to be carried, and these are very often moved in ways we are not used to seeing at home. The variety and volume of things which are hand-carried, by means of cart or small wheelbarrow is amazing. Above you see a massive number of rattan chairs being transported on a pull cart. It is hard to understand how two mere men even managed to balance all of these things on this piece of equipment, let alone wheel it across busy streets keeping it all in one piece.

Children are very often being carried on the backs of bikes. This is something we see at home as well, of course, but
at home this occurs mainly as a form of recreation..... whereas in the China, the bike is being used as daily transportation. All the bikes are fitted with some kind of basket, and this is necessary because the bike will be used as a means of going to work, or for shopping, or for school. No one in China, however, is wearing a helmet. Safety does not seem to be much of a concern on Chinese roads.

Bikes are not the only means of carrying people. There are more and more cars on the roads nowadays. And huge numbers of buses. We saw plenty of tour buses on the highways, and many a municipal bus in the cities. The fascinating thing about the city buses was that they always had people on them. In some US cities, the buses are called the Metropolitan Transit Authority(MTA). One is tempted to call these things the Empty A as they very often go by with not a soul riding aboard. This does not occur in China. There are just too many people and they all have somewhere to go.

Something we had never seen before was a strange phenomenon which one might call a bed bus. These are double decker buses which have 18 beds on each level, six rows of three. We saw half a dozen of these on the road from Suzhou to Shanghai full of people lying down in the middle of the day. What a way to travel. I really don't know who is riding these bed buses and whether they are used daily by part of a workforce which lives in one city but works in another, or whether they are used by people traveling long distances within the country.


We saw a tremendous number of trucks on the highway. At first I thought this was simply because China has become the factory to the world. Everything seems to be made in China, and once it is made, it has to be shipped out to parts East, for the most part.But news reports indicated that truck traffic was particularly heavy on our last day in China, when we saw this parking lot of 18 wheelers on the highway. A new exporting tax was due to take effect Sunday, so all factories were rushing their goods to port in the days prior, to try and avoid the tax on any completed product they had on hand, waiting to ship.

We saw yet another way of carrying things about when we visited Donghan Village in Huxian County to learn about peasant painting and to have a meal with a local family. This lovely little village is a sweet clean place with quiet streets. The homes are all connected, as is always true in this country where we never saw so much as one single-family home. Each building was fronted by the smallest strips of soil bordering the sidewalks, and each of these strips was intensively planted with herbs and vegetables of all sorts. We managed to capture this quite common sight.....a person pedaling a considerable amount of produce on the platform of a large tricycle cart. In this case, the woman is carrying large flat crates of eggs.