Flat Tire

It is daytime right now in China, therefore, I am not tired at all, and wide wake at 3:00 in the morning. So, I have decided to share my first funny China story with you. I will be sharing them as they come to me since writing them all down at once would make for an enormously long and probably extremely boring entry.

In China there are no real rules for driving/traffic. There are lines, but no one stays in them, there are lights but people often run them, there are speed limits, but most go much slower because of the insanity of the traffic there as well as the number of potholes and other road hazards including people, cows, dogs, and the list goes on.

About a week and a half into our trip we take a supposedly four hour (it really took about five and a half) road trip down to Mengzi (pronounced Mungza) with eight of us stuffed into this SUV that no American rental company would ever be allowed to rent out. Everything started out great as we embarked into the great unknown of the Chinese highways, until....we got a flat tire, then figured out that the jack was broken. Unable to understand Chinese and no triple A and no gas stations in sight, we frantically tried to wave down cars. Finally two different Chinese men stop one on a scooter (which wouldn’t have a jack) and the other in a three wheeled car thing (it’s hard to describe, they are odd looking, and are smaller than a Smart Car) with no jack. So what happened? The man in the three wheeled car went and got 4 friends, jammed them into his little automobile along with 5 big bricks (I am surprised the thing moved with all them in it), the men picked up the SUV put the bricks under it, helped change the tire, picked up the car again removed the bricks and were on their way.

It was one of those things that would only happen in China.