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1Good news for travellers! From 1 June, Bus Line A3 will run between Dongmen Square and Binhai Airport. On its way to the airport, it stops only once, at the Railway Station. The trip usually takes about 50 minutes.

2Lines 12 and 25 also go from Dongmen Square to the airport, and they will run as usual. They cost only 2 yuan, but they make 18 stops on the way and take about 90 minutes.

Times

3Buses leave Dongmen Square from 5:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. They run every 20 minutes on weekdays and every 30 minutes at weekends. Buses back to the city leave from Gate 2 of Terminal 1. The last one leaves at 11:30 p.m.

Tickets

4A ticket costs 20 yuan. Show a plane ticket for a flight on the same day, and you will pay only 15 yuan. You can pay by bus card or by phone, but not in cash. Children under 1.2 metres ride free. When the bus is full, they cannot have a seat of their own and must sit on an adult's lap.

Before you go

5Each passenger can bring one large suitcase and one small bag. Large suitcases go under the bus, so please get to the stop at least ten minutes early. Left something on the bus? Call 6688 1234 within 24 hours.

1Mr Wang runs a small bakery. He usually starts work at four, long before daybreak. By six, the first buns are cooling on a table by the open back window.

2One Monday, he counted the buns at half past seven. Two were missing. It happened every morning that week.

3Mr Wang thought of the three schoolboys who passed his shop every morning. They always looked hungry, and one of them often stopped at the front window. “It must be them,” he told his wife.

4On Saturday, he spread flour thinly over the table. At half past seven, two buns were gone again. In the flour he found small footprints, each with three toes in front and one behind. Shoes did not make prints like that.

5Mr Wang went straight out of the back door and looked up. Part of a nest was sticking out from behind the old sign above the door. Two magpies sat on the sign, and baby birds were crying for food.

6Mr Wang left the nest where it was. The sign gave the birds shelter from the rain. Every morning after that, he put broken buns on a plate outside the door.

7Three weeks later, the schoolboys stopped to watch the young magpies fly for the first time. Mr Wang came out and gave each of them a free bun. He did not tell them why.

1A hermit crab spends most of its life in a used home. Unlike a snail, it cannot grow a shell of its own, so it moves into an empty snail shell. The shell is its shelter: without one, the crab's soft body is an easy meal for birds and fish. But the crab keeps growing, and sooner or later its home becomes too tight.

2Usually a crab deals with this alone. It finds an empty shell, checks the inside with its claws and moves in. Its old shell is left on the sand, where a smaller crab may later find it.

3In 2010, researchers from Tufts University in the US described something more unusual. On a tiny island off the coast of Belize, they put out dozens of empty shells, coloured bright green so that they were easy to see, and filmed what happened. When a crab found a shell that was too big for it, it did not walk away. It waited beside the shell, sometimes for hours. Other crabs arrived and waited too, and slowly they formed a line, from the largest to the smallest.

4When a crab big enough for the shell finally came along, the line came alive. The newcomer moved into the green shell, the biggest crab in the line took the shell it had left, and so on down the line. Within seconds, every crab had a home one size bigger.

5Things do not always go so smoothly. Sometimes several lines form around the same large shell, and the crabs at the front fight over it, pulling with all their strength. Only one line gets new homes. The crabs in the other lines must go back to waiting.

1Zhou Yi earned the money for her first camera by tutoring her neighbour's son in maths. A new camera cost too much, so she bought a used one online from a man across town. It arrived in a worn box with a short note: “Works well. Please look after it.”

2That evening she turned it on and found that the memory card was not empty. There were 365 photos on it, all of the same lake. Each one had been taken soon after daybreak from the same spot, one for every day of the year before: the lake in spring mist, the lake in summer rain, the lake under a thin skin of ice. It was like a diary without words.

3Zhou Yi sent the seller a message. “I think these photos are yours,” she wrote. He replied the next morning. The camera had belonged to his father, a retired teacher who had walked to the lake every morning for years. After an operation on his knee, the old man could no longer manage the walk, and he had moved in with his son. “I didn't know the card was still inside,” the seller wrote.

4Zhou Yi did not simply post the card back. She printed twelve of the photos, one from each month, and made them into a calendar. On the last page she added a photo of her own: the same lake, from the same spot, taken at six o'clock that morning.

5A week later, the seller wrote again. His father had hung the calendar beside his bed and had asked only one question: “Will she take another one next month?” She has done so every month since.

1Before the telephone, the fastest way to send a message across a country was the telegram. A clerk tapped out the message in code, it ran along a wire as electric signals, and a second clerk at the other end wrote it down and had it delivered by hand. A telegram could reach a city hundreds of kilometres away within hours. It was not cheap, however. Telegraph companies charged by the word, so every word had a price.

2People quickly learned not to waste words. Everyday polite phrases such as “I am writing to tell you” disappeared, and small words like “the” and “a” were usually the first to go. A message such as “ARRIVING THURSDAY NOON MEET STATION” could do the work of a whole letter. Businesses went further. From the 1870s, many used code books that turned complete phrases into single made-up words, often of five letters. In one such book, AYYLU meant “Not clearly coded, repeat more clearly.”

3Chinese brought a special problem. The telegraph was designed for an alphabet of 26 letters, not for thousands of characters. The answer was a code book published in 1872 by Septime Auguste Viguier, a French customs officer working in China. It gave each common character a four-digit number between 0000 and 9999. A clerk looked up each character and sent its number; at the other end, another clerk turned the numbers back into characters. Messages sent abroad followed different rules, but for domestic telegrams the charge was by the character, so senders learned to pack as much meaning as possible into very few.

4In the telegram era, this style came at a cost. With so few words, a message lost its tone, and the reader often had to guess the meaning from the situation. A telegram that said only “COME AT ONCE” could carry good news or bad, and the person who received it might spend a long night wondering which.

5Telephones, fax machines and email slowly took the telegram's place. In the United States, Western Union, the best-known telegraph company in the country, stopped its telegram service in January 2006. By then it was handling only about 20,000 telegrams a year.

1My hometown has one old street that everybody loves and nobody can enjoy. Qiaotou Street is narrow and lined with small shops selling tea, rice cakes and handmade shoes. Early on Sunday mornings, before the traffic starts, it is the most peaceful place in town. For the rest of the week, it is a slow-moving car park. Drivers sound their horns at pedestrians, parents hold their children's hands tightly, and most people do their daily shopping and leave as quickly as they can.

2I believe the street should be closed to cars, at least at weekends. A street is not only a useful way of getting from one place to another. It can also be a place where people stop, talk and spend an afternoon. When cars dominate a street, that second use disappears, and so does the peace that makes people want to stay.

3The shop owners are worried, and their fear deserves to be taken seriously, because the shops are how they earn a living. If customers cannot park outside the door, they say, people will simply drive to the new shopping centre outside town. But history suggests the fear may be misplaced. When Copenhagen closed its main shopping street, Strøget, to cars in November 1962, many local shop owners believed the change would scare business away. The closure began as a trial. It proved so popular that it was made permanent in 1964, and today about 80,000 people use the street on a busy summer day.

4Of course, my hometown is not Copenhagen. Older residents who cannot walk far still need a way to reach the street, and shops need deliveries. But these are problems to be solved, not reasons to give up. Delivery vans could be allowed in before nine in the morning, and a small bus could run every fifteen minutes from the car park by the river.

5I am not asking the town to change everything at once. Copenhagen started with a trial, and so can we. Close Qiaotou Street to cars on Saturdays for one summer, count the shoppers, and ask the shop owners what they think. If business falls, open the street again. If the change gives business a boost, as I expect it will, keep it.