China diary#1. Beijing - something about Hutong's and traffic.

I've been sorting some photos and been looking through our diary from back some weeks ago, but so much has happened and I'm not really sure where to start the story.
Still I'm a bit blast away by the size of China, and the very different cities and landscapes we've seen and the distances we've traveled, and yet only seen so little of this huge diverted country.
We started out in Beijing, so why not start there by adding something to the small descriptions already posted from some time back, when we were "on the road".
Like all of China in general, Beijing is really changing, developing and growing. Many of the old original Beijing neighborhoods -called Hutong's- is being demolished to give room for the progress -read Investment and money making.
Yet in the old center and around Tian'anmen square and the forbidden city, many of these Hutong's still exist and it is worth while strolling around here to have a look. Either just by walking or by bike, which in fact maybe is the best option, as it is faster and you don't need to continiously reject all the offers of a pedicab or jigsaw ride -which for sure can be fun- but when you get of one after a finished tour, you can be sure that the next "offer" will wait just around the corner.
In these Hutong's you can still see how life could have been years back in time, a thing you for sure cannot feel in other district's in Beijing, where modern skyscrapers and huge fancy shopping malls together with a forest of construction cranes, will be the most common sight.
The pictures I'd had in my mind of thousands of bicycles peddling along the roads. also puffed away like a soap bubble. The streets is still filled, but now by myriads of cars in every possible size and standard, leaving an astonishing noise, as the most common tool to make the way through the frenetic traffic, seems to be the use of the horn; "if you can hear me, get out of my way".
In some ways my romantic imagination of the thousands of Chinese on their bikes through Beijing, still could seem to have something true about it, now they are all just behind the stirring wheel of a car, but still drives and acts like on a bike. The traffic in China is a mystery to all visitors I guess. There seems to be no rules as everybody just seeks their own way ahead, which often also leads to driving in more lanes or even the wrong direction on the roads. But as everybody is aware of how it works, not much goes wrong, or at least; we didn't see any accident in the 3 weeks we traveled around there. Crossing the roads was always something exciting, because you can't expect that anyone will stop, no, they just calculate your speed with their own, and then pass you either in front or behind. A dangerous thing for pedestrians -and everybody else- is if they suddenly stops, because you can be sure the driver in the car would have calculated you to be somewhere else by the time he might hit.