maps and memories and changes
I've spent a lot of time over the years looking at maps remembering the places on them I've visited. This can be challenging when it's places in China I'm looking at.
When I first returned to Aotearoa I could not get any of Baidu's services to load properly for some reason. Baidu Maps is great for Mainland China, but it just wouldn't load fast enough to be useable. It's loading fine for me now, but eleven years ago it wouldn't.
Google Maps is great, especially with things like satellite view, the traffic overlays, etc, but for technical reasons it's coverage of Mainland China is a mess - the map is offset from the satellite view and nothing lines up.
I've discovered that Open Street Maps has great, clear, detailed maps, and it covers Mainland China. Doesn't do the satellite view, though.
But using Open Street Maps, as I have done recently when reminiscing about Changsha and Taiyuan, I get confused for a different reason - so many things have changed! Changsha now has a subway system! And looking at the map now it looks very much like Taiyuan also has a subway system!
That last one feels odd - the "conventional wisdom" amongst the Taiyuan expats back when I lived there was that the city was so riddled with old coal mines that any attempt to build a subway would see the whole city collapse into a giant hole. I guess that wasn't true after all.
And whaddaya know, here it is, calling itself the Taiyuan Metro.
The other thing, of course, is that the last time I visited Taiyuan was twenty five years ago. I'm 50. Literally half my lifetime has elapsed since I was last there. Memory is fallible. Although there are a lot of things I remember very clearly from that time, the way brains process memories means, of course, that the image in my mind now doesn't necessarily resemble what was actually in front of me a quarter of a century ago.
But yes, the changes - subway systems, whole new expressways and ringroads. It can be quite disorienting when trying to find some old corner of a city you haven't visited in a long time.
And yes, I do love maps, have done since I was a small child. I'm now finding myself with a couple of problems that might possibly have something to do with me being a bit older now. The writing on Open Street Map is a bit on the small side, particularly in Chinese. It can be a bit of a strain to read it, even on a bigger screen like this laptop I'm typing this on. Baidu Maps uses a bigger font, but with less contrast, so the writing is a bit better camouflaged with the background - great if the characters were soldiers trying to stay hidden, but they're words that I want to be able to read. I'm sure I can fiddle around with the settings and find "old geezer mode".