Your Mom Stops Traffic in Xian
From ChinaSmack:
Yesterday afternoon around 3 o’clock, while this journalist drove towards the North Street and Xihuamen intersection, suddenly appeared ahead a middle-aged woman around 40-years-old walking amongst traffic, “collecting toll” from all of the cars passing through this street, skillfully knocking on the driver’s side windows of every car, then demanding fees from the driver, and the drivers all helplessly and more or less paying the toll.
Perhaps it was because yesterday’s temperature was too high (note: at the time, this journalist’s in-car thermometer showed 45 degrees Celsius), this female toll collector had a towel on her head and her upper body indeed was only wearing a white bra.
Check Out My Sweet Ride
I’m going to call it Hot Rod. I picked it up for 300 kuai which is only about 44 US dollars. There were even cheaper ones, around 150 kuai, but I figured those would be the most likely to fall apart in the middle of the ridiculous Chinese traffic.
Anyway, after having them tighten up all the bolts, I rode it right out of the store and back home. By the way, the store I bought it from is called Carrefour (spelling?). I don’t know if they are in other countries or not. I would describe it as a store trying to be the way the Chinese imagine an American supermarket.
It’s laid out like a western store, so it seems very familiar. The biggest difference is that it’s like a combination of every store ever. The top floor is massive grocery store with tons of fresh fruit and vegetables and all kinds of weirdo meat. It also has all of the standard food like cereal and soda and cookies and snacks. But then you take the escalator downstairs and thats where you can find pretty much everything in the world. It has furniture, bedding, toiletries, motorized scooters, bikes, electronics, clothing, jewelry, school supplies, like really, everything. I could keep listing forever.
Maybe I’ll go back and take some pictures. I also need to take some pictures of the traffic that I’ll be riding in. Until then just trust me that Chinese traffic is such a retarded clusterfuck it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. There’s 13 million people living in this city and none of them can walk, ride, or drive without getting in each other’s way.
I have a friend who would love it though because he could ride over pedestrians on his bike and nobody would give a shit. Pedestrians have 0% right of way. Buses and cars are king. Bikers are like wiley jesters switching from highway to sidewalk swerving in and out of cars and running down pedestrians. And that’s what I’ll be now.
Update: Apparently Carrefour is a pretty huge and well-known hypermarket chain run by the French. I probably should have just Googled it. But anyway, it’s still an amazing store.
