smokerblog

Emperor Ben

[SHENYANG, 1/18 9:00PM]

Today was a good day. Ben had decided this morning that my rolling duffle bag would make a good rickshaw, bus, and/or airplane. So I cleared some space and he (i.e., we) spent an hour-and-a-half wheeling it back an forth in the hotel room.

Otherwise, he voiced a few contrary opinions to some of my decisions, but nothing too strident. It helped that we both got a good night's sleep last night. Also, we seem to be communicating a little better. I'm starting to understand some of the words he uses and he is getting better at understanding me. We still aren't speaking a common tongue, but we're getting closer. Whenever I get frustrated at not understanding Ben, I just think about how he's going to feel in a week's time when there aren't any people around who speak his language.

Today's big event was to do some sightseeing. The temperature was well below freezing, but it was warm enough for Ben to handle it, so we took a tour of the imperial palace--that's imperial as in the Q'ing dynasty of the 1600's. This was the first time since being here that I would ever have been aware of the deep historical roots that exist here. There is a layer of hypermodernity covering everything else in Shenyang; stepping into the palace was like entering a time warp. Here are a couple of shots that give you an idea:

A word or two about the traffic here. You know all of the old television footage showing a sea of bicycles weaving together elbow to elbow, all seeming to be heading in a different direction with maybe a sprinkling of cars mixed in? Well, take that idea, but swap the bicycles and cars. I've driven in Manhattan and I've driven in Boston. Peanuts. That's amateur hour compared to China.

First off, the lanes markers are merely recommendations, no driver in China treats the dashed white lines on the pavement with anything other than contempt. Second, rear-view mirror are useless. Whatever raw materials are used to manufacture rear-view mirrors in China would be better used to make another boatload or two of color tvs to be sold at Walmart.

Side-view mirrors do get heavy use, but only to check to see if that guy on your rear fender is moving fast enough to hit you when you cut into his lane. Meanwhile, the horn is not used in China to signal frustration; instead, it signals intent. It's a sign that if you were planning on cutting me off, you'd better so it now since I'm about to squeeze through the right third of the lane you are currently using. Similarly, turn signals are a misnomer. In China, the should be called turn declarations. They over-ride horns by declaring the intent to cut you off whether you honk your horn or not.

You'd think that given this situation, jaywalking would be considered an extreme sport, something that Warren Miller would shoot videos of. Still, plenty of people do it. I've seen enough people standing on one of those irrelevant white stripes in the middle of eight to ten lanes of traffic, that I no longer notice it as anything out of the ordinary. Instead, I started looking for evidence of accidents and of all of the thousands of cars that I've looked at, I was unable to identify a single dent, ding, or scrape anywhere. Either the Chinese have figured out the perfect traffic environment, or there are some auto-body repair shops making some serious yuan.