There’s a moment I remember as being one of the most impressive ones. The first taxi ride: two hours from Pudong to Taicang.

I spent this trip on the backseat of a Volkswagen Santana, a car build somewhere in the eighties. The vehicle obviously already had its best time, a time somewhere during the same decade. Try to imagine someone driving this piece of scrap the same way he would drive his scooter. Imagine him doing so a 140 km/h, on a 4-lane highway, avoiding crater sized ditches. Dodging debris fallen off of someone’s truck. While playing the Nutcracker on his horn he gives me a sneer. He misses a biker by an inch. This cab was a chopper from ‘Apocalyps Now’, scaring pedestrians with a honk symphony. I can hardly remember him stopping twice for a red light. I read about this before. It’s not entirely against the law here. He wasn’t that keen on using his breaks. That’s for sure...And when something obstructed his path, this guy just kicked full gas. I remember something a friend of mine told me. He once explained me the importancy of this. When two eggs frontally smash into each other, the fastest egg won’t break. The egg of Dieter. U won’t see me on his backseat often. This goes without saying. Dieter will hit full gas to crash into a brick wall. The taxi driver was pretty confident too.. What I could tell from the general mood on the streets, so was everyone else here. No one waving their fist around, not even a wrinkled eyebrow. This guy wasn’t a maniac. Compared to other drivers, this one actually drove fairly safe. This is daily Chinese traffic. I don’t pay much attention to this anymore… In fact, it already habituated my driving style. This is a good way of sparing myself some frustration, sparing myself a lot of cursing too. Chinese don’t really drive that dangerously, just very, sometimes oddly different. Europeans can almost blindly trust on traffic rules, Chinese live by ‘the strongest survive’ mentality. Ideal wheels for such terrain are 4X4 actuated, under the biggest bumper u can find. The highway becomes yours. Your cushy suspension takes care of all the holes in it as well. I’m surprised. I only saw one accident happen here. They ride ‘creative’ but there are few speeding these streets. Chinese love to shift gears though. There’s a long way to go involving traffic rules. Involving anything on wheels. At preventing those ‘anything’ on wheels riding the streets

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