How in the World Do People Learn to Drive Here?

How in the world do people learn to drive here?

Let me start with I have no answers, but I have thought a lot about this in the past few days. Aiden has been learning to drive for the past year. He’s still has some serious learning to do and I think it takes a lot of practice to become a good driver.  The traffic in downtown Woodinville can be a bit nerve racking for a new driver at times, and especially for the parent of the new driver in the passenger seat. J The traffic and customs for driving here in Shanghai are like no other place I have ever visited. It is crazy! The amount of lane changes and driving between two lanes is insane. It appears from my perspective that the cars, taxis, scooters, or whatever just move into their intended lane at any given time without a care in the world that their might already be a car there. The obvious rule here is the bigger you are the more the rules don’t apply to you. The buses barrel through every situation. In fact, today we were sandwiched in between two buses that were each headed their own way, doing their own thing and we were innocently trapped between them. This was quite a conundrum; each bus thought that they were the biggest and most deserving of the right away. We got out of our situation unscathed because of the skill of our driver. By the way, we have our own car and personal driver, Yang, for the next month, he is calm, he is brave and he is a good driver. I am always impressed with how many close calls we have, but never actually running into anybody. We have been out a few times with him and each time we sit in silence since he doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Mandarin, but the question that I always really want to ask him is “How did you ever learn to drive in all this craziness?”