Words from a book!

I am reading a book right now , and it is not my MacBook or a cookbook, no it is a real book. Not that a cookbook isn't a real book, no what I mean is, it is a kind of story and though it is not fiction -or not completely. It is a story about a young American teacher who volunteered to teach English at the teachers college in Fuling in the Sichuan province, and he is telling about his first impressions in a Chinese city.
The book is called; "River Town" and is written by Perter Hessler. At one point he is reflecting about the noises and the traffic in the city, and when I read that I nearly couldn't stop laughing as it was the best description to the phenomenon we experienced this summer on our visit to China. So I'm going to quote Peter Hesslers words:

"Noise was even more impressive. Most of it came from the car horns, and it is difficult to explain how constant this sound was. I can start by saying: Drivers in Fuling honked a lot. There weren't a great number of cars. but there were enough, and they were always passing each other in a mad rush to get wherever they were going. Most of them were cabs, and virtually every cabby in Fuling had rewired his horn so it was triggered by a contact point at the tip of the gearshift. They did this for convenience; because of the hills, drivers shifted gears frequently, and with their hand on the stick it was possible to touch the contact point ever so slightly and the horn would sound. They honked at other cars, and they honked at pedestrians. hey honked whenever they passed somebody, or whenever they were being passed themselves. They honked when nobody was passing but somebody might be considering it, or when the road was empty and there was nobody to pass but the thought of passing or being passed had just passed through the drivers mind. Just like that, an unthinking reflex: the driver honked. They did it so often that they didn't even feel the contact point beneath their fingers, and the other drivers and pedestrians were so familiar with the sound that they essentially didn't hear it. Nobody reacted to horns anymore; they served no purpose. A honk in Fuling was like the tree falling in the forest-for all intents and purposes it was silent."

Page 62 and 63 from the book "River Town" by Peter Hessler, published by John Murray Paperbacks, 2001.