The Traffic Dance

It is supper time at work. I ate the food the wife provided me and now I can blog.

The afternoon was busy enough. I taught one class and planned for 7 hours worth which I will do tonight and tomorrow. I marked the final test for Legris which I did last night. I did more scheduling. I alwaysmake last minute changes to any planning I have done.

Part of my prep involved watching and making notes about the W.C. Fields' short "The fatal glass of beer". I will show the film in a movie class I will do tomorrow. The film is bizarre. I don't anticipate the students being able to understand all of it, but I am sure the film will amuse them somewhat. Some of the idioms have to be explained. Some of the language has been localized to make the characters sound like hicks and so confuse the students more. But I can use this to explore the theme of differences between the Chinese city and countryside.

Tonight, I will do a Speakers' Corner which I wouldn't normally mind but there has been a Castro coming to them recently.

I made a women scream as I rode to work today. I caused this to happen on the road that the Blue Bar is on: Chong Ning Road. I just finished making a right turn onto Chong Ning from Jie Fang when this woman decided to cross the street. I was expecting her to slow down but she didn't so I veered to go around her on the left. But as I tried to do this, she stopped and so I tried to veer around her on the right. But she then moved forward and we were locked in the fatal dance where instead of going in opposite ways to avoid each other, we were going the same way and headed for for a collision. This realization caused the lady to scream and I to come to a quick stop. The lady screamed something in Chinese which I didn't understand and we went on our way.

In a world where everyone follows the rules, the woman would have been clearly in the wrong for crossing where she did. But in China where no one follows the rules, the etiquette is different. In her mind, I was probably in the wrong. I don't know how to live in anarchy.