Of course, living in China is not all about awkward questions and cultural faux pas. For those who are considering living abroad, China is a good option! There is a lot to love about living and working here. So, I wanted to share a few of those things. One of my favorites is the transportation system.
Many people ask me how much I spend on my commute to work per week where I live in China. I normally respond, “Around 5 dollars a month.” It’s just so little per week, I find it easier to round to the month.
At the current conversion rate, I don’t spend even that much. I only spend about $3.50 per month to commute to work. And sometimes I spend even less since there is a free school shuttle I can take to and from work as well, and I do that a couple times a week. Why don’t I always take it? Because the schedule doesn’t always work with my teaching hours or meeting schedule. In any case, my commute to work is cheap.
It’s not only cheap, it’s convenient.
Where I live, there is no subway, but you don’t need one. There are many buses, and they run often. There is also an app you can use that will show where the buses are. So, for example, when I get ready for work in the morning, I can just check where the bus is. Then I leave my house when the bus is a few stops away. This means I’m not sitting, waiting, and wondering when the bus will come.
But China is a developing country, so it is always changing. They are working on a metro in my area. In a few years, people will be able to take the metro all the way from Shanghai to Suzhou. Kunshan, where I live, is right in the middle of these two cities. Imagine a metro system that stretches more than 100 miles!
Then there is the high-speed train. You mean like Amtrak?
No, not at all. I mean the sleek, clean, efficient bullet trains that can go up to 186 miles (300 km) per hour. This means it is possible to travel from Shanghai to Beijing in less than 4.5 hours. This distance is about the same as the one between my parents when my mom lived in Philadelphia, PA and my dad lived in Stone Mountain, GA. It would take my dad 12 hours speeding to drive that distance to get me and my brother for the summer. If we had a speed train, we could travel to him in just 4.5 hours.
Of course, in China, such convenient travel is also quite affordable, especially by US standards. To travel from Shanghai to Beijing in 4 hours and 18 minutes, costs just under $80 one way. In comparison, travel from Philadelphia to Atlanta would costs $111 one way on Amtrak, and it would take 16+ hours!
The other benefit of traveling by train is that you don’t have to show up 2 hours before hand like you do with flights. Check-in does notend 45 minutes before departure. There is a security check, but it’s nothing at all like the airport. You can keep your shoes, belt, jacket, and everything else on, and if just take a sip of your water, you can keep it. In fact, you can get to the train station just 20 minutes before your departure time and still be good if you know where you’re going. As long as you get to the ticket gate more than 3 minutes before departure time, you can still catch the train.
You can also bring whatever food you want on the train, so Ben and I have packed dinner, gotten on the train, and then eaten it. Like airplanes, there are trays in front of every seat for you to use. The chairs recline, and first class even has a foot rest and headphone jacks for you to listen to music. Business class is even nicer, though I’ve never traveled business class myself. Honestly, coach is nice enough.
You don’t have to pack your own food though. Ben and I frequently buy the meal sets offered on the train, or we order food to be delivered to our seats during the trip from one of the restaurants at that train station.
Yes, you can order food and have it delivered to you on the train.
Here’s the way it works. Let’s say you know that you are going to travel to Beijing, and about halfway through the trip, it will be dinner time. The night before your trip or the morning of, you can go on the train app and check out what food options are available at different train stops. Not every train stop has this service, but enough of them do that you have options about the time and location you eat your meal. You then order on the app. When the train gets to that stop during your trip, either a delivery guy runs on and brings you your food, or one of the train hosts will bring it to your seat.
So, you can have food that was actually cooked in a kitchen at a restaurant brought to you hot as you sit on a train during your trip. However, even the microwave re-heat kind of options available on the high-speed trains are pretty good. This all only costs about $5 per meal, which usually includes rice, one or two meat dishes, one or two vegetable dishes, and some pickled vegetables, if you like that kind of thing.
It’s a super comfy way to travel, especially for anyone who doesn’t like airplanes.
Of course, my favorite thing is that it is almost NEVER late. Your train scheduled to leave at 15:17? That’s when it takes off. Barring extreme weather, you can set your watch by this train. Also, there are many options throughout the day. Can’t make the 9:11? What about the 10:15? Of course, it depends on where you want to go, but as a developing country, the number of times, stops, and other options are always increasing.
Every day I live here, I think “It must be the kiss of death to be considered a developed country. What you want to be is always, always developing.”
So, I always find it surprising when people ask me if I would ever consider buying a car in China. It’s not just people from the US who ask this question, but people in China as well. Not surprisingly, I always respond no.
One, the driving here is more “adventurous,” let’s call it, than I am used to. You have to keep in mind that the vast majority of the drivers on the road have only started driving very recently. Just 10 or 20 years ago, very few people owned cars. So, you are almost always on the road with novices, not just to driving itself but also to the very culture of driving that is almost embedded in the US. Also, one of the benefits of living in China is that I do not need to own a car. It’s so easy to get around, why would I want a car payment, car insurance, and maintenance fees? I can reduce my environmental footprint and get where I need to go in good time.
Of course, I could say a lot more about the transportation system in China. I could talk about how this development has been primarily in the East, and the West of the country is lagging behind significantly. I could talk about how transportation is not a political topic for debate when you have more than a billion people to move around the country, so it makes development in this area easier in China than the US. I could also mention how the transportation is a monopoly,almost entirely controlled by the government instead of individual companies, which makes decision making a little less complicated in some ways.
However, I will leave it here. I think the overall trend in China is development; it’s moving forward. And it’s so exciting for me to move along with it, whether on the bus, metro, or high-speed train.
**The featured image is of a Harmony bullet train at the Kunshan South Station.
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