I traveled to Hangzhou for vacation and I noticed that there are some aspects of the society that are neat.
- The subway is clean
- The subway does not have trash lying around
- The maps / navigation apps in China have some cool features
- One of the coolest features was the ability to tell you how long the light will stay red and green.
- There are a ton of cameras
- I believe this is for public safety purposes. I’m curious to know how the video and images are stored. Capturing all of this content every day would take a lot of storage space on the local, state, and country level. Even if the content is deleted after a week or two, the content would still need to be stored and be queriable in order for it to be useful.
- The to-go / takeout culture is popular
- I passed by a to-go bubble tea shop and the workers were working like crazy. All of them were busy fulfilling orders and the orders kept piling in. When I saw the television, they had like 45 orders fulfilled out of 115. When attempting to order online, the app said that the wait for a drink would be 90 minutes 😬. This job seemed like one of the eternal punishments in Greek mythology
- The people are pretty sociable and like to play cards and mahjong
- This may be a biased observation
- It doesn’t seem like people are concerned about micro plastics
- To me, I think that they prioritize the convenience of plastic over the health consequences
- The cost of living is lower than the States and other cities in China, such as Shanghai
- Food, transportation, movies, spa, haircuts, basically everything I saw was more affordable. However, this could also be biased due to the strength of the US dollar
Jeffrey's Thoughts 