negotiating traffic

Traffic is one of the most memorable parts of China. It is like nothing else I have ever experienced and like nothing I could have imagined. Whenever I am riding my bike I am constantly reminded of the part in finding Nemo where they are in the middle of all the jelly fish playing a "game" in order to get back into the open water and Marlin says "It's ok, we're having fun, we're cheating death and having fun at the same time." It really feels like a video game, constantly swerving and breaking to avoid hitting or being hit by cars, taxis, busses, other bikers, motor scooters, rickshaws, or pedestrians. I am sometimes surprised by how "normal" this part of China has become, even though it is by far the craziest and most dangerous part. It's hard to find the words to describe what it is like, so here is a humorous article someone wrote about traffic in China that I think epitomizes it pretty well.

Motoring madness puts spoke in China's wheel
Fintan O'Toole

Letter from Beijing: For the benefit of intending travelers, here are
some Chinese rules of the road:

1. Driving is like making cloth or baskets - the skill is in the
weaving. If there is more room on the far side of a three-lane highway,
your duty is to get into it as fast as possible. Lanes are for bowling
alleys.

2. Sound waves are a powerful form of energy. If you blow your horn
loudly and continuously, obstacles in your way will disappear, clearing
the road ahead.

3. Seatbelts restrict the flow of blood to the brain and may be
dangerous. Drivers may buckle up if they are approaching a police
checkpoint, but the belt should be removed as soon as the checkpoint is
passed. Passengers should on no account wear seatbelts, as attempts to
find the buckles which have been carefully stored under the seat covers
may distract the driver from an important mobile phone conversation.

4. When approaching a junction with a major road, enter the flow of
traffic immediately and decisively. The drivers on the main road will
be well aware of your presence, even at night, and stopping to wait for
a gap may be interpreted as an insult to their sixth sense.

5. Remember that Kung Fu movies such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
are entirely realistic. Chinese people can sense at all times what is
happening behind them, even without looking. They also have
lightening-fast reflexes, so any momentary danger will inevitably be
averted.

6. Overtaking is a spiritual quest, a homage to the gods of time, who
do not like to see their precious gift wasted. The less time wasted and
the more dangerous the maneuvre (for example, overtaking on a hairpin
bend on a mountain road with a ravine 5,000ft below) the greater the
devotion demonstrated. You will get your reward in the next life, a
destination which you may also reach sooner than everyone else.

7. Even the narrowest road has two sides - it is wasteful not to use
both.

8. If you find yourself facing a head-on collision with another
vehicle, it is vital to assume that the other driver will blink first
and take the necessary evasive action. If everyone abides by this
principle, then there can be no confusion. All drivers will understand
their proper responses in this situation and there can be no danger of
an accident.

I offer these rules as a cut-out-and- keep guide for anyone intending
to travel to China, because, oddly, they are not published by the road
safety authorities and can be learned only by observation. This might
suggest that they are not rules at all, but they are universally
observed in every part of China I've been to so far, and are presumably
so well understood that they do not need to be made explicit.

So deeply entrenched are these rules, indeed, that they turn on their
heads western perceptions of what is and is not good driving. In the
West, for example, someone who swings out into the middle of the road
while approaching a blind blend is a maniac who has no right to be on
the road. In China, such a person is genuinely a good driver. If you
assume that when you turn the corner, there may be cars bearing down on
you (because they are overtaking on the other side of the bend), then
it makes perfect sense to stay in the middle so that you have room, if
necessary, to swerve to either side.

This kind of skill may explain one of two astonishing aspects of Chinese driving: the relatively low rate of accidents. It is not that the carnage on the roads in China is not appalling, even by Irish standards. It is. In China, injuries from road traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people aged between 15 and 45. Every
day, about 600 people are killed and 45,000 injured on the roads. But
if you travel in buses and taxis for a while, these figures come to
seem remarkably low.

I can hardly believe that I've seen only one bad crash in the last two
months. (Though having my eyes closed most of the time may have had
something to do with it.) The other amazing thing is the relative
absence of road rage. In most other societies, driving would come to a
halt because the roads would be filled with the bodies of drivers who
had shot each other, or with the burnt-out wrecks of vehicles whose
owners had spontaneously combusted. But I've only seen one episode of
serious cursing, when a parked car suddenly and without any signal
pulled out right in front of a taxi I was in, missing it by a
centimeter. The taxi driver turned the air blue and the guilty party
gave a sheepish smile and an apologetic wave, as if he had accidentally
brushed up against an old lady's elbow.

When only the most egregious offences raise any objections, it seems
clear that all the other offences are regarded as normality.

This all means that there's no point in asking Chinese people to
explain the awful driving, since they don't regard it as awful at all.
On long drives, when I've got tired of taking the holy name in vain, I
try to calm myself by thinking up explanations. The most obvious is
that mass driving is a new thing here and that China has gone from the
ubiquitous bicycle to 130 million motor vehicles in the blink of an
eye. But such an explanation would equally apply if Chinese drivers
were slow and cautious.

I do think bicycles have something to do with it, though. Most drivers
learned their road sense in the bicycle era, when weaving around
obstacles made sense and the risks from a crash were small. Another, related, reason may be that the car is still a symbol of personal freedom, an escape from a communal rule-bound world into a private space where you can follow your own instincts. Or maybe it's just the peculiarly Chinese combination of fatalism "If I'm going to die, there's nothing I can do about it" and optimism "Sure, haven't I survived worse?" that comes from a hard history.>>

So don't be scared, although it's hard not to be. But there is nothing to be done but accept it and try to be careful, which I always am.

In other more uplifting news, I had my first final in my TV watching class on Monday and it went pretty well. We just watched a small ten-minute part of a movie and had to answer questions about it. 1 down, 6 to go. I also found out from my swimming ayi that the boy who took me swimming doesn't work where he said he worked, or so rumor has it. I don't know what to think but it i nice to know they are watching out for me.