Shanghai Subway

While obviously not as fun as motorbike taxis, the Shanghai subway is the epitamy of convenient public transport. My expat friends have told me that they prefer it to the subway systems in London, New York, and Paris, which apparently smell bad. Heck, all I knew before was the Wellington bus system which has buses half an hour late on a good day. To a small-town Kiwi like myself, the Shanghai subway is exceptional! If you miss the train, dang, gotta wait another 3 minutes for the next one. Woe and betide.

The London subway, my English friends tell me, has so many suicides that passengers are desensitized to it. They would often hear an announcement that there's going to be a 15 minute delay because someone jumped in front of the train again, and the first thing they think is "dammit, why can't he jump off a bridge instead? Now I'm late for work". But I never heard such an announcement in Shanghai.

...Oh wait. I can't understand Chinese. So technically it could have been happening while I was blissfully unaware (there's a perk to not understanding the local language), but I don't think so. Most stations have a fence to stop you from doing that anyway.

One can go all over Shanghai via subway and never learn to drive in ten years. There's just no need. Just bring a book, or an ipad or something, because you may be spending two hours on the train every day. I suppose you could look over the shoulder's of other people and get a few silent clips of a movie out of context, or an annoying ipad game without the volume turned off so everybody on the carriage has to listen to the sound of exploding spaceships, but its better to read a book or listen to a podcast or chinese lesson or something.

Remember the beggars I told you about? They like to spend the day on the subway even if they're not going anywhere. They walk up and down the trains begging to the passengers, and once they've covered a train they'll get off and jump on another train, and repeat the process. They must travel all over Shanghai doing that - paint the town red, underground! Other people like to hang out in the subway station, simply because of the free air conditioning during the intense summer heat. "It's nice and cool at the subway station boys! Bring your sleeping mat, let's go!"

Today's mem was a reminder I made for myself about the tones for the word di4 tie3, meaning 'subway'. It works, because you really can transfer from line 4 to line 3, but you have to remember the order in which the numbers come.