Getting ready to leave this morning -- everybody's packed up their weapons for the flight, and man do we have a lot of them. I only have one sword so far so I'm fine, but some folks have boxes and boxes.. A couple guys bought long weapons like spears and kwandaos. No thanks. Don't want to haul those things.
We've made it to the airport now so I have a bit more time to write. Took us about 2 hours to get to Zhengzhou, 120km away. Another high-speed journey. We had to stop for lunch before we hit the airport, of course, despite the fact that we had just eaten breakfast 2.5 hours earlier. I guess they figure that if they don't keep us all in one place for 4 hours a day eating, we'll run amuck and subvert the country or something. As we're leaving, a cop bangs on the driver's window and makes him pull over. Seems we backed out into a large intersection with a large bus at a busy time of day. So instead we have to park along the street for 10 minutes while the cop and driver discuss things, during which time pedestrians and bicycles have to swerve around into the road to avoid us, reducing the street to one lane and backing up traffic. We blocked the intersection for 20 seconds, so the cop pulled us over and messed up traffic for 10 minutes. Guess that's why he's in charge.
Traffic rules in China are simple -- try not to get hit. Right-of-way is strictly Darwinian: pedestrians tend to yield to bikes, who tend to yield to cars, who tend to yield to trucks and busses. It is common courtesy to honk your horn whenever you approach someone you might possibly hit. (This results in all drivers honking their horns on the average of once every two seconds.) There are No Horn Blowing zones, but you can ignore them. Traffic lights are amusing decorations. If you need to make a left turn across an intersection, just turn whenever -- it becomes the other guy's task not to hit you. (But you must apply the Darwinian order to determine whether or not oncoming traffic will care if they hit you. We were in a bus the whole time, so we pretty much owned the road, except for those cement trucks.)
Traffic everywhere we've gone has been a total mess. China's economic explosion has put too many cars on the streets too quickly. The streets were built for bicycle use with the occasional car -- now that there are as many cars as bicycles on the road, it's anarchy out there and no one can get anywhere quickly. No one pays attention to traffic rules so it's not likely to get any better anytime soon. It's perfectly acceptable to use oncoming lanes to pass traffic that seems to slow, so traffic needs to go slower to be ready for cars suddenly swerving out from oncoming traffic. Even LA has better traffic than here.