The actual haiku is from, perhaps unsurprisingly, a bus in Osaka. I was impressed by the courtesy, even more so that the bowing had been built into the bus timetable - which was ruthlessly accurate. To the millisecond.
The irony comes in the photograph, which is from... a somewhat different society: Beijing. I got delayed by 48 (forty eight) hours in Beijing on the way home. The image shows one of the many airport buses shuttling me between airport and airline-arranged hotels. Amusingly, no-one spoke English, so I would advise that you only travel by Air China if you can break out some degree of Mandarin. Suffice to say, there was very little bowing in the Beijing buses.
The irony is strong in this one.
ReplyDeleteThe actual haiku is from, perhaps unsurprisingly, a bus in Osaka. I was impressed by the courtesy, even more so that the bowing had been built into the bus timetable - which was ruthlessly accurate. To the millisecond.
The irony comes in the photograph, which is from... a somewhat different society: Beijing. I got delayed by 48 (forty eight) hours in Beijing on the way home. The image shows one of the many airport buses shuttling me between airport and airline-arranged hotels. Amusingly, no-one spoke English, so I would advise that you only travel by Air China if you can break out some degree of Mandarin. Suffice to say, there was very little bowing in the Beijing buses.
Toodlepip,
Hobbes