A trip to China

 Hello, it's been a while since I've written anything and I'll try to do more going forward.  I've had an eventful year, I got engaged shortly after the ball dropped in Times Square, bough a house with my fiance, commenced renovations of the house, got married, and went on a honeymoon in China.  And I thought some of the stuff I saw in China would make a good topic to write about.  There were a bunch of little things about the physical environment that were different, and not just stuff like architectural style.

One thing that was present on all the sidewalks and a lot of public buildings was the tactile paving.  It's there to let blind people navigate around by the feel of the ground underneath.  There are lines to show direction of travel and dots for changes in direction, cross walks, and other things to be aware of.  This one was yellow but mostly they're the same color as the rest of the sidewalk.

Another thing on the ground where these green arrows showing how to leave a building in the event of a fire.  Part of me thinks that signs on the ground aren't noticeable enough, but I suppose if people know to look for them it works.  

A lot of buildings in northern China have curtains you push through in the entryways that seal together with magnets.  

Room service delivery robots aren't exactly unknown in the US, but all three of the hotels we stayed at in Baoding, Xi'an, and Beijing all had them.

In the US we have bike lanes but usually they're just sized for bikes.  In China instead you tend to have a full sized lane full of bikes, mopeds, rickshaws, and the occasional car going slowly or parking.  And speaking of which...

I wasn't expecting so many three-wheeled electric rickshaws around.  They were nicer than you'd expect from the word "rickshaw", here's the one my mother-in-law drove us around in when we were in Baoding.

One bit of crosswalk design that I thought was neat was that you didn't just have a countdown that starts when you can cross the roads and tells you how long you have to cross, there's also a countdown for how long you have before you can start crossing.  I was surprised at how much that made it easier to wait for the walk signal.

I'd seen pictures of buildings in China covered in LEDs but it was more common than I was expecting.  Not every building, certainly, but a bunch of them.  And speaking of buildings.

In the US you mostly see low rise residential buildings but China is all in on the tower in the park style.  Most of the cities I saw seemed to be made out of little groves of identical buildings in a way you seldom see in the US, at least in the cities I normally end up in.