Transportation in China is not for the faint of heart

by Iva Skoch on

I was looking the the images and videos from blizzard-crippled China this morning and it made me remember my 2004 trip there. Especially the photos from Guangzhou, China’s major southern city… I remember that train station! It was packed with thousands of migrant workers then, so I can’t even imagine what it must look like now, after hundreds of thousands of people have been stranded. (See Aaron’s post from earlier today.)

This photo, by AFP, is from Guangzhou: a man pushing his friend inside an already packed train. While nothing quite that extreme happened while I was there, I will say that the Chinese people do have an amazing ability to squeeze a lot of people into packed trains and buses. Getting inside is half the fun. It is like graduating from University of Darwinism – only the strongest and those with the sharpest elbows get in. At first, you feel like you shouldn’t participate in this. After all, you are on vacation and have time…but then you realize you will never get in if you always allow everyone to get ahead of you. So you start pushing and showing with the rest of them. When in Guangzhou…

Chinese troops help ease weather woes

by Aaron Hotfelder on

China is seeing its worst weather in the last 50 years, and it has caused enormous problems the last several days. Heavy snow has resulted in power outages all over central and southern China, and thousands of travelers have been left stranded. According to the Telegraph:

“In tropical Guangzhou, near Hong Kong, 200,000 people are sleeping in temporary shelters after trains were cancelled. Some of those stuck at stations, airports and on the roads have criticised the government for being too slow to respond.”

Despite the criticism, the Chinese government has come up with a novel way to make use of its military, the largest in the world. They are sending a half-million troops, roughly 20% of their total soldiers, to clear roads and rail lines that are blocked by snow, as seen in the photo above.

Any chance one of them could come over and help scrape the ice off my windshield? It’s freezing outside.

Elephant attacks American tourist

by Catherine Bodry on

When Jeremy Allen McGill set out in China’s “Wild Elephant Valley” nature reserve yesterday, he was probably just hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the magnificant beasts. But McGill got that and a lot more — for unknown reasons, an elephant used its trunk to pick McGill, who teaches English in China, up and then tossed him.

An official said that three elepants were roaming as close as 65 feet from McGill, and also noted that elephant attacks have happened before — “mostly after the pachyderms were spooked by camera flashes or loud noises from visitors.”

Bear attacks and moose tramplings aren’t uncommon here in Alaska, and though they most often occur when someone has surprised the animals or gotten between them and their offspring, they often result from brave people trying to get close enough for a good photo. The same thing happens in Yellowstone with wild animals that have gotten so used to humans they casually munch away until someone gets too close.

Sixty-five feet from an elephant might count as too close for me. You?

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World GDPs compared to those of US states

by Aaron Hotfelder on

This fascinating map shows how the Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) of some countries compare to the GDPs of the US states. The numbers may be slightly outdated– go here for the exact numbers from 2005– but the map is interesting nonetheless. California has the largest economy of any state in the US, and it would rank in the top ten worldwide if it were its own country (which it kind of is).

A country’s GDP is the value of all the goods and services it has produced in a given time span. The GDP of the US for 2007 was roughly $13.22 trillion, still far ahead of its nearest competitors despite the notoriously weak US dollar. Predictions of GDP for 2007 and 2008 show, however, that countries like China and India are catching up.

Link via Strange Maps.

Find out what’s on the exact opposite side of the world

by Aaron Hotfelder on

As a youngster, I was often told that if I dug a hole deep enough, I would eventually find myself in China. I tried “digging a hole to China” a couple times, but I’d always give up as soon as my shovel would hit the bottom of the sandbox. Needless to say, I was not bright as a little boy.

Through the magic of the internets, we’re now easily able to discover just where we’d pop out if we really dug a hole through the center of the Earth. This map is handy for finding out a rough approximation of the antipodal (opposite) point of any place in the world, while this one is better for a bit more precision.

So if you were to dig a hole to the exact opposite side of the Earth, would you really end up in China? Not unless you live in certain parts of Chile or Argentina. In my case, I’d need to bring my swimming trunks, and so would almost all residents of the continental US, as we’d end up in the Indian Ocean between southern Africa and Australia.

Somehow, the phrase “dig a hole to somewhere between southern Africa and Australia” just doesn’t work.

But if you do dig a hole to China, you might expect to see….

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