I could spend hours in Shenyang just taking pictures of the motorcycles, their drivers, passengers (up to three!) and whatever they carry. But I only have half a second to get my camera out of the bag, focus, and click—not that anyone cares about having their driving skills immortalized, it’s just that wherever I am, I’m in the way and I could get run over.

There are motorcycles, bikes, tricycles, and the odd backhoe going at full speed on the sidewalk, a supposedly safe space which is already remarkably hard to navigate because it’s also a parking lot and a giant open-air market with sellers offering anything from kǎo dìguā (烤地瓜, roasted sweet potatoes) to the latest Hello Kitty toys. Quite logically, pedestrians take half of the road, but this is where (most) truck and car drivers choose to drive, hard to blame them.

I feel like Jesus parting the Red Sea every time I cross the road. Feng invariably runs across it, slaloming between cars, a skill developed at the tender age of 6 when he had to walk home from school.

“Wait for the green light!” I shout. “There were barely any cars on the road in the 1980s! Things have changed!”

But traffic doesn’t stop for pedestrians anyway, so his method may be safer… because don’t think for a second you can happily cross the street when it’s your turn to do so, traffic lights are just a suggestion in Shenyang.

Other than these small details, Shenyang is a friendly city. It’s not like locals really want you to die—they’re just busy going somewhere and they happen to have two whiny kids on the motorcycle or maybe twenty boxes piled high, so they may as well get wherever they need to be as fast as possible.

What do people do when they’re not driving some kind of vehicle?

Much like anywhere in China (and possibly in the world), they eat, work, socialize, and have fun.

Here are the people of Shenyang!