A Ride in a Peugeot

We wait for a little bit less than an hour in the arrival hall, as we ended up in another terminal than the one we told LJ. You can't get an idea of a city or a country by looking at its airport, they look the same everywhere. And it seems that people in airports all over the world do the same thing these days: they talk on their smart phone or touch the screen of their tablet. Or perhaps it’s the contrary. Well, the airport in Wuhan is not an exception.

LJ finally rushes into the arrival hall, welcomes us and soon we are in the car. Her friend, who happens to speak French and owns the car – a Peugeot – is driving while LJ is making conversation.

The drive to our university takes about an hour, mostly on multi-lane highways. We definitely notice some driving trends. First of all, people never really stay in their lane. It’s like the driver looks straight ahead and doesn’t care too much about what’s going on behind or on the sides. So if you want to pass a car, on the left or on the right, you honk as a warning. Also, it seems that people in Wuhan don’t really know how to drive in the snow, like people in the south of the US or France. Cars are stopped, in the middle of the road. They are bumping into each other and some have stopped traffic.

Finally, people own pretty nice cars. The German brands of course are around; the Japanese and American ones are also pretty common. The French ones – Peugeot and Citroen – are some of the favorites, may be because the factory is in the city. Citroen is even the official taxi car.

We don’t really get to drive through Wuhan. We feel a bit lost somewhere between the countryside and the sprawling city. Here and there, we see clusters of high-rises. And an explosion of development everywhere else: new interstates and train lines being built, new high-rises and factories being constructed. We finally make our way across the Han river to our town: Hanshang, one of the “three towns of Wuhan”.

After being stuck in a traffic jam right in front of our university – Jianghan University (JU) – we finally arrive on the campus. Three years ago, this area was assimilated to the countryside. In two years, the subway is arriving in front of the university, hence the construction and the traffic jams.