Foggy Day

We had another foggy day this morning when we were riding the staff bus to school. While it's often foggy in the mornings here, there have been two days in which the fog was so thick we couldn't see anything around us as we drove through the streets of Suzhou. A couple of weeks ago the fog was so dense that the bus driver had to honk at each intersection to make sure he wouldn't run into anyone, or them into us. You might be asking why people continued to drive, ride bikes and scooters, and walk across streets in these conditions, but in China that is like asking, well, like asking "why" about anything around here. It's just the way it is, and why change your habits just for safety's sake? Safety is really not at the forefront of anyone's mind around here. That might explain the worker sweeping in the street today in the fog. When he became visible only a few feet in front of our bus, our driver was skilled enough to swerve. The worker didn't even flinch.

Even in the fog, cars, busses and scooters don't turn on their headlights. I read somewhere that the Chinese believe that turning on car headlights will drain the batteries. The most dangerous time of day to walk around here, in my opinion, is at dusk, when you can barely see the cars, and they surely can't see you at all. I've been in taxis careening through traffic with no headlights at all, when the sun was already past the horizon. If that's how they operate every day, a day of fog is not going to change that. Don and I were on the bus laughing about the lack of headlights, when, lo and behold! we spotted a car with lit headlights. Maybe they thought this was prudent in their case, because they were driving on the wrong side of the road against traffic. In the fog. Safety first!