Road Kill

From the second floor, the 7 days restaurant has a splendid view over the busy intersection that it sits beside. This particular road is always very busy - in fact, today there was a man with a red flag there who helped us cross the road. But while we were in the restaurant this evening, there was a terrible accident at the intersection. Two small vans were involved. One had its bumper torn off, and the other got a dent in its door. There was traffic chaos. Two police cars arrived and started directing traffic round the scene. My illusions were temporarily shattered. There is so much traffic here, so many cars, so much tootling of the horn (as they say in Chinese translations), so many underpasses and overpasses, so much swapping lanes and ignoring red lights and zebra crossings and general mad driving, that for the first day being a passenger is horrifying - and yet you quickly start feeling safe and secure because actually, everyone does seem to know what they're doing after all - and therefore there must be no such thing as accidents. So to see an accident after only a week - it was like finding out that Santa Claus isn't real when you're only 18 months old. Reassuringly though, S said it was the first one he'd seen since he'd been here.