July 5, 2007, 11:10 am

Down in the hall watching two of our Laoshis playing (or attempting to) pool. Quite endearing because they aren’t very good, but then, neither am I.

I think one of the biggest initial culture shocks of coming to China is seeing the ridiculous ways people drive. All lane marks, traffic lights and signs are merely suggestions – guidelines would be putting it too strongly. First, there are always lots of bicycles, trucks, motorbikes, cars, and the occasional mule drawn card on all of the town roads. Then the roads are pretty shitty to begin with, unless you’re traveling on a well-maintained highway. If a bus idling on the side is in your way, you don’t wait for it to go, you just swerve into oncoming traffic, miss the car coming at you by six inches, and get back into your original lane. Usually we’re in the hotel bus when we drive into Dalian, so we see the scary driving moments, but it isn’t as scary because we’re in a big bus.

But when we travel by small car – like when we took the taxis to Lushun – you see the constant narrow misses a lot closer – because you aren’t as high up in a car. I actually enjoy the experience of driving with chaotic cab drivers (whether in the States or abroad) but even yesterday’s taxi ride to Lushun left my heart in my throat a few times. I just had to keep closing my eyes or look out the window at the scenery so I wouldn’t see the swerve around the truck with one foot of clearance.

And crossing streets feels like an exercise in evolution. As Jade says, in the US, the car will stop for you. Here, you stop for the car. Even crossing in crosswalks is fairly precarious – I just try to wait until a big group of people has massed, and then I scurry across with them.

Also, I’ve only seen one bicycle helmet (save for the obvious sport cycling teams) since we’ve come to China – and it was on a European looking guy riding a bike in Beijing. I can’t imagine learning how to ride a bike or drive a car on actual roads in China, but I guess the chaos is pretty normal if you grow up with it. And we’ve only seen one or two accident scenes since we’ve been here – it’s like Chinese drivers are both the best and the worst drivers in the world. They completely ignore everything American drivers obey, but they’re brilliant drivers because they seem to have less accidents than we do. I guess this is what we’d call “organized chaos”.