Hanging in Liyang, Part 1

Many expats who live in China love to grumble about the cities they live in. They also love to use the words "backwards" and then go on to voice a litany of complaints about all the American or European comforts they can't find. Poor them! They are so oppressed -- never mind that they actually chose to come here and are making much more money then their Chinese neighbors.  I am reminded of this every time I venture out into small town China. Changzhou has over four million residents. It's bigger than Chicago. Smaller cities have 1 to 2 million people. That's still bigger than your average American city. Some Chinese cities have larger numbers than whole countries, like New Zealand. For me, getting outside of the Chinese urban centers provides me with a valuable perspective. It makes me grateful for the "small" Chinese city I lived in for more than three and half years.  Recently, I did this gratitude exercise with the town Liyang.

Getting to Liyang requires mostly riding a long distance bus. Yes, the city has a train station, but it's on a limited line. Liyang is also a county level city that is under the jurisdiction of Changzhou. So, let's think about this carefully. Liyang, while a city in it's own right, is actually part of a larger, neighboring city, and there is no rail link between the two. However, there is a rail link between the city and Shanghai. Higher economic priorities dictate, I guess. The bus trip there took over three hours, and the bus back took about two and half. Traffic matters. 

The area around the intercity bus station is deceptive, at first. This is likely because of my American aversion to Grayhound stations. In America, bus depots usually tend to be in shitty parts of town.  In China, that doesn't seem to apply. In Liyang, it also seems to not apply.

RT Mart, a Korean supermarket chain, is actually next to Liyang's bus station. In the three days I spent in this town, this turned out to be the most international of groceries the town had to offer. Here, I was able to stock up on cans of Monster and a few bulk bags of fruit before heading off to settle into my hotel further up the road, in Liyang's downtown. 

 My initial dismissal of the area around the bus station proved counter productive. Standard, western logic, would suggest that restaurant and nightlife culture would be around what seemed the city center. In Liyang, this didn't seem to be the case. Yes, me hotel ended up being around the town's central shopping districts, but those get rather boring at night. Next time I go back to this town, my attention to this needs to shift away from the urban center. This is probably for the best. A lot of the tourist attraction comes from the natural scenery and the hills around Tianmu Lake. 

So, the travel lesson here is this: when in small town China, don't laugh at the idea of hanging in restaurants near the bus station. It's good advice for traveling through urban America (trust me, I once got robbed in Pittsburgh), but China is clearly not America. Nor should it be.