observations on biking in china.

china has been added to that list of countries in which the phrase 'oh insert country of choice...' is used as a way of staying sane in response to the multiple situations/circumstances/events per day that just don't make any sense.

here are a few things i have learned/seen in my two weeks of biking in china.

- as far as i can tell, china is a country of people in cars/trucks/buses on foot/bike/motorcycle playing a life long game of chicken. getting stared down by an 85 pound 70+ year old chinese woman is a frightening experience. she won, i swerved.
- the only consistent rule of the road i've observed in china is 'the bigger you are, the more you can get away with.'
- in keeping with this, red lights seem to be viewed as some sort of challenge by truck and bus drivers. red lights mean anything goes. green lights mean proceed with caution.
- it's not uncommon to be nudged out of the bike lane by trucks/buses that don't feel like waiting in traffic.
- it's not uncommon for trucks/buses to use the bike lanes as parking lots.
- i've had to avoid hitting a disconcerting number of unattended children between the ages of 2 and 5.
- i get a lot of attention on my bike. sometimes it feels like i'm in a race. except no one speaks english and no one is cheering me on. they're just yelling at me.
- things i frequently hear are 'laowai!' (literally 'old outsider'), 'waiguoren!' (foreign person) or 'oh! tai gao le!' (oh! too/very tall!). yesterday when i was biking through town a chinese woman who must have been at least 75 yelled, in english, 'oh! you're so tall! like a mountain!' that was unexpected.

somehow, despite all of this, things just seem to work. we all get where we need to go. it's just a bit more exciting along the way.

last night i read this quote about driving in india, and it feels very applicable to china as well:

'in the west, people take everything very personally.

in much of india, we still dont have traffic lights, and our streets are a throng of drivers, pedestrians and sometimes animals all trying to cross each other and only narrowly avoiding each other. drivers honk their horns constantly at each other to alert each other that they are there and to vie for position, but take it far less personally. we know that it is the roads and millions of people trying to live their lives and get to where they are going. our culture reminds us that sometimes life is impersonal. we all are subject to impersonal forces - like traffic.'