I should walk on the sidewalk, but motorcycles take it too—Electrical ones! You don’t hear them coming behind you!—, so it’s easier to walk on the road.

Also, don’t think for a second that you’re safe after a few flights of stairs on pedestrian overpasses. The stairs fail to deter them, they go up and down the ramps at full speed.

Strangely enough, we’ve crossed empty freeways easily in Zhengzhou—go figure.

Welcome to China, where the biggest danger may be the locals’ questionable driving skills.

Okay, maybe I should take that back. They are excellent drivers, no matter what they drive—cars, trucks, motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, and other unidentified motorized vehicles. It does take some serious driving skills to make your way through pedestrians, street vendors and cars—because yes, cars occasionally drive on the sidewalk too. May as well, right? And let’s not forget the fact that most of them treat one-way streets as a suggestion, plunging into oncoming traffic like Moses parting the Red Sea.

Fun fact: nobody except a few delivery drivers wears helmets.

And it’s also totally normal to see motorcycles loaded with two, three or four people, occasionally including a sleeping baby (the baby isn’t driving, though, Chinese people are not that reckless).

I stopped waiting for the green light to cross in Zhengzhou. The universal “traffic stops for pedestrians” symbol was giving me a false sense of safety because if most (… a few?) car drivers do brake reluctantly without coming to a full stop, other vehicles don’t give a damn. It’s much easier to cross the road whenever you feel like it, as long as you don’t mind running.

Here are the people of the province of Henan, with pictures taken in Zhengzhou, Luoyang and Kaifeng!