posted on 2008-04-18 - amd.im/Gzg3
Traffic laws are never obeyed here. my cabbie blew by a cop last night passing on the right the cut him off on the left to get in front of more traffic. There are people littering the streets, more people than I have ever seen in my life... It's like the Times Square shot when the kid is lost in New York and everyone is pushing him into crosswalks that he doesn't want to cross.
Until today, I have been amazed that there aren't constant collisions all over. I would venture a guess that I spend approximately 15% of my commute back and forth from the factory driving in the shoulder to pass cars that are driving slower than the flow of traffic.
However, on my commute to work today, our driver had an "incident". We were driving down a busy street on our way to getting to the highway for the 20 minute highway ride to work. We left a bit later today being that it is Sunday. We decided that if we don't get a weekend, we're going to sleep in and leave at 930... Well this decision led to commute during a time when a lot of people are on the road, or at least thats how it seemed.
As we drove down the street I saw that there were pedestrians crossing the street back and forth and back and forth, and eventually two of them got trapped on the dotted yellow line between a VW Santana, a bus, and our Passat... Well, the man was able to skinny up and squeeze between the cars. The pregnant woman with him was not so lucky, our driver clipped her with his mirror and ran over her heel with his tire. He then slowly crept his car for some distance looking out the back window as they yelled at him. Eventually, he stopped in the street and left the car and proceeded to yell at the pedestrians! After much yelling and a beggar approaching them with an empty bowl outstretched, the driver returned to the car and pulled out his wallet and handed the man what looked like 200RMB (~$30). What amused me is as soon as the car was stopped Matt told me that this would be resolved with money and to be sure that I did not acknowledge that I actually had any on me. He was right on.
amdavidson.com is a simple blog run by Andrew Davidson, a manufacturing engineer with a blogging habit. He sometimes posts 140 character tidbits, shares photos, and saves links. You can also see posts dating back to 2005.