Anna Crouch’s group
Name of authors: Jeffrey Wang, HKIS grade 7 student
Date of writing: Thursday, April 23, 1998
Location of writing: In China Travel Service Chinese Overseas Hotel
Taishan, China
Wow! These 5 days of cycling were so awesome. The only bad part of our
trip was the way we were treated while cycling on the highways. I feel
that biking on the highways in rural Guang Dong Province was very scary.
The cars, busses, trucks and the "tricycles with a motor on them" were
driving me crazy. I didn’t always feel safe. Every time I heard the sound
of their horn on the road, my heart started beating faster. It was the
sound of their horns that drove me crazy.
On this trip in the Guang Dong Province, I heard many sounds, but I noticed four main kinds of horns. Do you want to know about them? The first one not only is in China, but also is all over the world. It is the sound of the bicycle. The bicycles have bells on them and they rang them when they got close to us. The bell has sound like dring dring, dring. The second horn sound comes from a motorcycle. It sounds like a "beep". It is an electric horn used for saying hello or to warn you when they are coming behind you or in front of you. They usually sound like this: "beep, beep, beeeeeeep …… beep, beeeeeep!" They don’t only beep one time, they beep many times and that made me irritated. The third type of horn is the air horn, which is part of a very big vehicle like a bus or large truck. I think that they "BLAST" it at you because they think that they have more rights on the road and they won’t care about anyone on a bike. I guess that’s why we need to stay on the right side of the road to maintain safety. The air horns hurt my eardrums a lot. Sometimes they blast their horns right next to you and that’s scary. Finally, the special horn ….. it is the horn on the "farming truck". The truck has two large wheels in the front and two on the back of the truck. It looks like a large 4-wheel tricycle with a big motor sitting on the front wheels. The horn has a sharp tone and was very loud. It was the loudest the horn of all. When I heard it, I moved to the side of the road as fast as I could. I was always scared when this loud "tractor" came trooping by. I was surprised that it was as small as it was. Whenever I heard that extremely loud horn, I expected to be passed by the biggest vehicle in the world.
After a week in rural China, I think that I am an expert on horns. I can tell what kind of vehicle is coming just by the sound of their horn. Even though the horns scared me and irritated me, I’m glad that the drivers used them because it gave me a warning to get over as close to the side of the road as possible. It is much better to be irritated and scared by the sounds of horns than it is to be in an accident.
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Hong Kong International School (M.S. Div.)
Hong Kong, China
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