Judging Distance

On the bus, the Ohioan among our group judges where he is in relation in our apartment by stops. That is, coming home from teaching we exit at the fourth stop from the university. However, it wouldn’t occur to me to judge distance that way. I place my location by architecture.
Our residential complex, a labyrinth of oppressively identical three-story buildings, take their one and only optimistic cue from n occasional and erratic gable painted pastel. Metal arches bearing colored lightbulbs arc over the mini-streets throughout. We have as of yet to see them alight; they do not light my way home at night.
The complex is the building to come after what looks to be yet another college, at the front corner of which is a police station no bigger than a bus. It’s not officially a stop, but people who evidently work in the possibly academic building, usually get on there.
We can take the same bus into the commercial center of Xingcheng (sounds like Sing Chung). I don’t know to count how many stops it is from our apartment, but I do know that, if we wish to get on another bus that takes us to Huludao, the next and bigger city, we get off adjacent to a public park and a billboard apparently advertising the joys of military life.
If we take a bus into Huludao from the university we can get off at the public sculpture that decorates the roundabout, and from there we can walk to a single-story strip-mall like building to get to the bar that caters to Westerners.
It’s not just that my life compass used to revolve around architecture, it’s something perhaps more practical. I can’t convince myself to count stops when the bus often stops at undesignated places. Sometimes one or a few people, who are far from the nondescript walls that indicate a bus stop, will simply signal the bus as they see it coming.
I wish my fellow Ohioan ease and utility in counting stops. It sounds a good idea in theory, one I likely would have used in Chicago when riding the El (if I weren’t so busy making visual love to that great city’s architecture). For me, however, architecture signifies regions and countries, socioeconomic levels and public-versus-private, it’s a way of gaging where life has taken you and what’s around the bend.