Here are some photos of my drawing of what is inside a room.

It is a little bit better that the previous drawings.

This post was created one months ago, and only show up today.

For people tired of going to West Lake in Hangzhou or The Humble Administrator’s Garden in Suzhou (I mean, after you visit these two places for more than 10 or 20 times), they may be interested to find out somewhere that si near Shanghai, and offers something new. Wendy and I went to Jinji Lake last Tuesday on our six year wedding anniversary. To my greatest surprise, the Jinji Lake has been turned into a new West Lake type of tourism destination, and a Xintiandi type of clustering of modern chain high-end restaurants, and Around-Century-Park type of high-raising residential areas.

How to Get There

Among all the transportation options, driving seems to be the most practical way to get there (do you want to take public transportation just to have a cup of tea along the lake?) It is about 100 km from Shanghai, and takes 1 and half hour to get there.

You can take Shanghai-Nanjing Expressway 沪宁高速 A11 (wonderful newly completely 4-lane expressway) heading Nanjing direction, and turn to Suzhou City Ring Expressway (East) 苏州绕城（东）heading Zhou Zhuang 周庄. Take the Luzhi/Airport Road 甪直/机场路 Exit, and get to Airport Road (a.k.a S343) heading west for 15 km. Jinji Lake is on your right hand.

If you do want to take public transportation, find a train from Shanghai Railway Station to Suzhou Railway Station (pretty frequent – 30 minutes interval), and take Bus 178 to get there. Google Map also suggests that you can walk from People’s Square to Jinji Lake. It costs 16.5 hours, and 81 km. :-)

The Emerging Center

The Jinji Lake is a natural lake that is a little bit bigger than West Lake of Hangzhou (7.82 sq. km v.s. 5.6 sq. km). Just like the old capital Hangzhou to West Lake, the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) is the source of the development of Jinji Lake. With huge amount of industrial and commercial activities going on in the park, it is taken for granted that the big natural lake within the area become the entertainment and residential center.

Sitting at any corner of the lake, and look around, you will be amazed by the high raising business towers, and residential buildings. They surround the lake like a curtain. Even you are used to the buildings in Lujiazui, you may still be surprised by the numbers of skyscrapers, and the speed people are building it. If this would have happened to the West Lake, people may say it is a disaster. But in Jinji Lake, the concerns seem to be much less, since this lake on the first day, was designed and built to be a modern West lake – the skyscrapers are also part of the characteristic of Jinji Lake, just like mountains and trees do in West Lake’s example.

Li Gong Di 李公堤

Li Gong Causeway (Li Gong Di 李公堤) is another reason to convince me that Jinji Lake is moving toward the direction of West Lake. The 1400 meters long ancient causeway is now renovated to be a modern street with all kinds of restaurants, and bars.

If you have a day to spend, and have been to Hangzhou for so many times, Jin Ji Lake is another option.

The train collision near Jinan killed 71, and injured 416.

Little flower for the victim in the accident

That is too bad. Not to mention those who were killed, I am horrified by the news story of a young man who broke his own arm to be able to escape from the train cart.

When I talked about risk of altitude sickness in Tibet, but to be fair, the risk of living anywhere in China is also high. I don’t want to count the long list of big accident country wide in the past, just to name a few that seems close to me:

A gas station near my home may exploded, killing 4, and injuring 40.

Maglev, which I am both a big fan of in terms of technology, and am writing against it for its cost, can catch fire.

The Metro train also kills. Not only this time, it happened once again, again and again.

If I keep counting the experience I had before I started blogging in 2002, I also can list some terrible accidents I feel very close to:

At the Christmas eve of 2000, fire in my home town, Luoyang, killed 309 – a number till now I cannot believe. When I was in middle school, that shopping center is the closest and the biggest in the area of my high-school.

In the summer of 1993 (July 10, 1993), just one day before I took train from Luoyang to Beijing to visit the capital for the first time, a passenger train No. 163 from Beijing to our direction collapsed with the cargo train in the front, killing 40 people (again, most of them comes from my city). I remember the sad face of the crew of my train after they hear about the news.

These are just few accidents that I feel pretty close to me. There are much more than that in the whole country, not to mention the frequent airlines disaster.

Transportation is a big thing everywhere, but how can I be assured that I am still lucky enough in the next accident? The key question is, who cares after so many accidents happening everywhere? Most of them are because of very stupid mistakes that are so easy to prevent.

I complained about sense of safety in the cyberspace (website can be easily shutdown at any time), it seems we need to move our focus to the safety of lives also.

The country needs some change to make it better. I keep thinking about it….

This is the view outside my window – the view before the May holiday. The cloud came and rain is not far away.

Photograph by Vince Zhen

In the middle is the Shentong Plaza. Before it are the buildings in Shanghai Jiaotong University. You can see the playing ground on the left and the libary (the white tall building). On the right is the People’s Square area….

I am writing this short guide to friends who are going to U.S. for the first time. What I did in the last few years is a little bit different. I used to introduce Shanghai to first time visitors from foreign countries. To be honest, most of the articles answer questions I received from email, from my foriegn friends. For other topics, I just imagine what people may encounter, since I don’t have first hand experience about how the life of a foreigner looks like. What a pitty. For example, I totally have no idea about hotel information since I never stayed in any hotel in Shanghai.

For this short guide, it is more practical. They are problems I encountered myself and the solution I found out. (So don’t expect it to be the most accurate and perfect solution).

I am going to complete it in the next three months, with 5 to 10 articles. This is not my style though. I was not good at planning, or strategy in business term. I am practicing now. :-)

Here are the table of content.

1. U.S. Visa Application (suggested by DC)
2. Flight from Shanghai to U.S.
3. What to Bring with You.
4. The Airports (both in Shanghai and in San Francisco).
5. Transportation without Renting cars.
6. Renting a Car in U.S. with Chinese Driver’s License
7. What to Buy, Where to Buy and What to Bring Back to China
8. Food (suggested by Carroll)
9. …
10. …
11. …

The …’s are place holders. Let me know what questions you have. I won’t have complete answer to everything, just my very limited travel experience (6 times?) to the west coast of U.S.

Many topics were covered before. If so, I directly link to that entry. If I don’t have it already, I write it later.

I will be at Lijiang and Lugu Lake area in the May holiday. :-) and will get back on May 3. I don’t have the same expectation as I had for the Daocheng trip, but I believe it is some place for me to sit in the Sun and really enjoy the peace of life.

After I setup this site, I am often mistakenly regarded as Mr. Know-Everything… I am surely not. I only took the advantage of knowing both Chinese/English languages. :-D

XHJ asked me about how to get India visa for Chinese citizen. I didn’t know that before, but I saw this information may help XHJ to get married with the girl he loves. I read some Chinese website and got the following information:

Visa Type: Business Visa

Valid period: 2 months

Max days to stay: 30 days

Requirement: All passport visa holder

Materials needed: two 2′ photos, photocopy of national ID (both side), passport valid for 9 months.

Source: http://www.china.org.cn/chinese/TR-c/215864.htm

More information on India Visa:

• Yun Nan Travel (Chinese site)
• EU Trip (Chinese site)

It is the worst of time. April is the hard time for people in China – among the worst in my life (26 years). The impact to everyone’s life is comparable with the year of 1989 and the flood in 1998. Today is the last day in April so we have some time to review the whole SARS event in this month – actually, all major events related to SARS happened in the month of April in China.

To open the links in this page in a new browser window, press SHIFT key while clicking on the links.

Statistics

Up to 10 AM, April 30, 2003, there are 3460 SARS cases country-wide. Among them 1440 cases were in Beijing. (Source: Sohu.com)

On Wangjianshuo’s blog, 24 articles were devoted to SARS, including 2 in March and 2 in Feburary. 322 comments were left in one month around the topic of SARS.

Summary

The course of development of SARS epidemic, the preventional actions and the media reports of SARS in China can be clearly divded into three stage, seperated clearly by two events:

1. First media conference on April 3, 2003, when Minister of Health first announced the SARS to the media.

2. The second media conference on April 17, 2003, immediate after which the sack of two officials were announced.

I will call the three stage as:

• Stage 1: Few reports, no actions.
• Stage 2: Lots of reports, few actions.
• Stage 3: Intensive reports, solid actions.

Let’s review the articles on SARS on Wangjianshuo’s blog to see the stages.

Stage 1: Few reports, no actions.

Feb 12: I first heard of atypical pneumonia from my classmates in Guangzhou on Feburary 12 (maybe few days before). I didn’t realize that this will be a global problem.

Feb 16: For days later, China Daily reported atypical pneumonia was under control. I was very happy to know the news. However, as I wrote, the anxiousity was not under control yet.

Mar 23: My friend asked me on MSN Messenger that “is it (SARS) bad in Shanghai?”. Well. I didn’t know anything about SARS at that time. It was the first time I heard of the term of SARS.

Mar 26: I was educated by the symtoms of SARS.

Mar 27: SARS hit the headlines of local newspaper for the first time. It said “there is no SARS in Shanghai”

Apr 1: SARS begin to cause a little bit panic in the city. People who have access to emails are among the first batch to get the rumor of SARS. Actually, the rumors sounded very scary. Most of them, however, proved to be completely fake two weeks later. Meetings began be to postponed.

Stage 2: Lots of reports, few actions.

After the media conference, the ban of newspaper report on SARS was lifted. Media began to discuss about SARS publicly.

Apr 6: Shanghai looks good since the rumor discontinued because of the media coverage began.

Apr 8: My expat readers began to participate in the discussion about their feelings about SARS in the city. SARS was a much more serious issue for them.

Apr 9: I said “Panic under contrl, SARS may not“, because although the media repeatly report there is no SARS cases in Shanghai, or there is only one SARS case in Shanghai later, I didn’t see any preventional actions around me yet.

Apr 10: Hospitals and hotlines setup in Shanghai.

Apr 11: More and more people from abroad were asking me “shall I cancel my trip to Shanghai?“.

Apr 15: Lots of SARS websites were put online.

Apr 17: This is the first article of my Daily Life in Shanghai. The positive sides is, all media (radio, TV, newspaper and websites) are talking about the preventional measures of SARS. The dark side is, the taxi driver told me they never disinfect their cars although TV news report said so.

Stage 3: Intensive reports, solid actions.

April 20 is the turning point. It is rare that a official were fired for their fault. After the sack of former health minister, the officials of the whole country were shocked and quick actions were taken.

Apr 20: 339 SARS in Beijing. May Holidy Cancelled.

Apr 22: All evidence proved that China is taking SARS seriously. Disinfection of the buildings and announcement of dangerous trains with SARS suspected patients happened.

Apr 23: Situation of SARS in Shanghai became severe. Disinfection went to the next level and the eight regulations from the Shanghai government really impacted everyone’s life – travel outside Shanghai restricted; masks for most service industries became must; temperature were taken at all ports.

Apr 24: Pictures in Beijing and Shanghai are better than thousands of word: the situation is worse, but the actions were solid.

Apr 25: The whole nation became more united than ever. Solidarity became the first priority. People of all industries and all cities were fighting agaisnt SARS. Moving stories hit the headlines of newspapers. I posted “Protect China – Not Only Against SARS” in response to the false report of some medias on China.

Apr 26: Daily Life – SARS related II. You will see very encouraging changes in Shanghai about the thorough work the government have done. It was the second reason why the city of Shanghai had much lower case of SARS. (The first reason was purely lucky).

Apr 27: WHO finally released the findings of the five-day investigation. It was a positive one.

Apr 28: Check what it was to have a dinner now in Shanghai.

Apr 29: Daily life – SARS related III. I felt safer now, although the threats of SARS were still there.

Apr 30: SARS Shanghai – April Review (this article) came out.