Last Thursday we took our first trip into Zhengzhou,

a large city about 1 hours drive from Xinzheng, my new hometown.  Xinzheng is considered a rural farming town out here in China, but it actually boasts of about 600,000 people living here.  While it has a ton of normal shopping, the prices can be a little high and the variety of items is small.  Consequently, a lot of the foreigners and students prefer to go into the much larger Zhengzhou (8 Million Inhabitants ~ the size of New York City) for a greater selection of products and more opportunities for bartering prices down.  

One of the things Zhengzhou offers that Xinzheng doesn’t is a far larger number or walk-in clinics, including one that works solely on Job Physicals or Physicals required by Visa Applications.  So this past week we were sent into Zhengzhou to visit the clinic to have our physicals for the Permanent Residency.  This was really our first major foray outside of the College Campus, since we have been so busy moving in and settling down.  It didn’t help that classes were starting last Monday and we had to instantly jump into lesson planning.  But all that aside, this was really our first adventure and we soaked up  every minute of it.  I’ll post more about the physical itself later, but here are a few things we noticed in our drive through the city:

The Traffic is INSANE!  

Two lane roads that suddenly have five lanes of cars, scooter and taxis driving down the sidewalks, huge poles holding up the overpasses above suddenly appearing in the middle of a driving lane, no merging lanes, and a complete disregard for any road signs contributes to what seems like absolute chaos.  It’s truly amazing that there are not more accidents than we saw.  There are NO traffic laws ~ at one point we had a four way corner with cars going from each corner all at the same time, crossing three lanes of traffic in any given direction. The only exception is that you are responsible for everything in front of you.  Conversely, you don’t have to look behind you at all, whoever is behind you is responsible for not hitting you.  It’s pretty confusing, but they work it out. Makes for a lot of butting into lines.  

Crazy Drivers ignoring the lanes

I couldn’t snap fast enough to get the hold picture, but these two lanes meet at the bottom.

It doesn’t help that they tell you how long til the light changes. All the cars just get impatient and jump the light.

Scooters and bikes take up a shocking amount of room!

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Tags: China, Henan, PRC, Tourism, tourist, Travel, Xinzheng, Zhengzhou