Ten Minute Wait?; Head-On Collision; Busy Streets and Ghost Towns, New Red Lion Location; Rome and Moronland; Stone-Faced Who?

• My wife Jenny was telling me that our trip to the local motor vehicle branch, to pick up stickers to put on our windshield to show that we were insured, would only take ten minutes. Turned out when we went to the place, there were 103 people ahead of her waiting to be served. While she waited in the branch, I sat in the car. We were there for over an hour and a half. Turned out that people getting these stickers were in the same queue as people paying traffic fines. At least, I wasn't experiencing this waiting at a tourist place like say, Shanghai Disneyland. There it would have been more annoying because I was paying for it.
• Driving back from having dropped off Tony at school, I took my longer-distance but saving-time route. I was driving down this wide six lane road with light traffic, when I passed an accident scene. It looked like these two cars had had a head-on collision. I say "looked like" because the accident scene was in a place where a head-on collision just didn't make any sense. The half of the road we were on was a one way for a long distance without any places to make turns. The nearest intersection was about a kilometer away. I was thinking that maybe one of the cars had spun but from a quick look at the scene, one could see that it couldn't have happened. These cars were grill against grill and there were no skid marks. So, I had to conclude that one of the cars had driven been driving the wrong way. The nearest intersection where the wrong-way car could have turned was big and wide enough that one distracted or short-eyed driver could have turned into the wrong lanes. The next question was about the actual collision. Even if the car was going the wrong way, the vehicle going the proper way should have seen the car coming. The road was long and wide enough without anything to block one's view. (Of course, the wrong way car could have been blinded by the rising sun.) The vehicles must have slowed down enough before the collision because they weren't totaled if they had been going at 50 or 80 km/h. Anyway, it was very strange. But this was not the first time, I had passed an accident scene where it just didn't make any sense what had happened given the position of the vehicles.
• Walking around my area one evening, because I couldn't put up with Jenny tiger-mothering my son Tony, I passed busy thriving streets as well as ghost-like places where the buildings had been built but had not yet seemed to have found tennants to occupy them. There was the Hui Shan Wanda Plaza which seemed to be thriving. Then there was the area around the Times Square Plaza, which is across the street from Wanda, which was full of interesting looking but unoccupied retail units. As well there was the fenced-off Times Square extension behind the main Times Square, that seemed foolish to have been built when it was being built given that the place was then losing business to Wanda.
• The Red Lion which used to be the Blue Bar which used to be the True Blue Bar has re-opened in its third location since 2004. I know this via WeChat. Whether I will actually go to the new location remains to be seen. I have heard the place has further jacked up its already notoriously high prices. Also, the logistics of me going there with someone else, say Tony, is maybe something I won't be able to pull off. Sill, never say never. (When the Red Lion reopened, someone put a Wechat Moment asking if anyone knew where he was. Because he said something about an old place reopening, I guessed Ronnies. I don't know if the guy would have gotten the joke. (Ronnie's used to be the Blue Bar's competition and was the first real expat bar in Wuxi.))
• Filler thought (because I want to sent this entry off and nothing else is happening in AKIC that can be blogged about): They say that when one's is in Rome, one should do as the Romans do. But one should one do if one is stuck in Moronland?
• Another filler thought: I shall refer to someone famous these days as Stone-Faced Fuck. Who do you think am I talking about? Email me with your guess.