The traffic around the Bell Tower in Xi’an, which was actually kind of tame compared to some of the other traffic patterns — or lack thereof — that we’ve witnessed in China.

As I mentioned before, traffic in China is a bit more … umm … chaotic than in the United States. To get an idea of what it’s like to be driving, or just riding, through traffic in China, imagine the traffic pattern coming out of a toll station on a U.S. interstate, where you have about 10 lanes of traffic merging back into two lanes, and none of the 10 lanes exiting the toll station are marked clearly, so you have cars jockeying for position and cutting in front of each other without any clear lines to follow. Now quadruple that amount of traffic, add in a bunch of pedestrians walking across those 10 lanes, and toss in a bunch of scooters and bicycles, and you have Chinese traffic.

Judging by the way people drive here, China must have the toughest driving skills test and the easiest traffic rules test in the world. In the week or so that we’ve been in China, we’ve seen:

• Our behemoth of a tour bus make a U-turn through three lanes of on-coming traffic in Beijing.
• Said bus making a three-point turn in the middle of a busy intersection.
• Said bus backing up for what seemed like 100 yards into a narrow alley, with cars parked on the side, and brushing up against branches and Christmas lights on trees.
• Various vehicles that we rode in coming within a foot of pedestrians or bicycles.
• Cars, scooters, and bicycles going down the road the wrong way.
• Our minivan making a left turn on red (and our driver telling us that it’s legal to do so here).
• Our minivan, along with all the cars in front of us, passing on the right — and on the shoulder! — on an interstate.
• About 20 cars ahead of us using the shoulder of a highway as another lane, forming a line into a toll station.
• Our van nearly squishing a car between it and a concrete wall at a roundabout.
• Our van making a four-lane pass in the blink of an eye to get from the left-most lane to the exit ramp for a gas station.

Despite all this seeming recklessness, however, we only saw two accidents, a sideswipe/fender-bender mishap in Suzhou and a bigger spill on our way back to Shanghai where a tractor trailer went off the side of the hill on an on-ramp.

If you go to China, remember:

1. DON’T DRIVE. Just don’t. Taxis are extremely cheap anyway.
2. Don’t look at the traffic when you are riding in a vehicle driven by someone else. Just trust that you’ll come out of this ride unscathed.
3. Before getting into a car, pray, burn incense to Buddha, go visit a mosque, and do whatever other acts of karma-building you can.