BEIJING - I roll my eyes when I hear people grouse about the driving in foreign countries. Who hasn't heard about those pesky Guatemalan mudbogs where no one drives in the lanes, or the German autobahn where folks drive so fast that they bend the space-time continuum. Yeah, I already know.

It's bad. You were in another country, not on a new planet.

China has different stuff, too. But I love it. It's way cool.

Being a proud Albuquerquean, I wear the fact that I come from a city with a bizarro street system like a badge.

I tell my curious Chinese students how I would love to drop off a Chinese cabbie in 'Burque and watch him seal his own doom as he runs the photo-enforced light at San Mateo and Montgomery boulevards. Drive as fast as you want. Go ahead. I want to see how a long a cocky Chinese yuppie could shred pavement in his black Audi A6 before attracting the loving attention of a Ford Expedition from the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Department. Bet they would love to turn on the Christmas lights early for him.

I sincerely doubt even the most hard core Beijinger could comprehend that Montgomery turns into Monta?o at I-25, or that Zuni is both Lead and Coal after Washington. Chew on that.

Try riding your bicycle to work in my hometown, I challenge them.

Make your commute a bloodsport. Even Lance Armstrong would quake in his tights after a near miss with a PNM truck on Broadway.

Beijing is a city whose streets are organized around a "Ring" system. The city is centered around Tiananmen Square, which is circled by the ring freeways. These main arteries surround the most dense part of the city the same way the rings on a tree surround its center. There are a total of five Ring Roads, spaced about three miles apart. The newest, Sixth Ring Road, circles the suburban outskirts of the city on all four directions.

(They don't have a First Ring. They started with the Second Ring Road.)

The system allows the city to be easily divided into four equal sections. It's very logical. Too logical, I think. I am almost irritated with the cleverness of this city's roads. I come from a city that fights for decades to make a four-lane bridge across a river to reduce congestion, then stripes it for two lanes, then changes it to four and makes everyone mad. I was born in a town that fights building a loop highway the same way a body fights an infection. I come from a city whose labyrinth style planning would make MC Escher wince. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

I clinch the tales by telling my captivated English classes of Albuquerque's lethality to the uninitiated pedestrian. Street gangs with feisty cholos, stealthy casino-bound octogenerians who can't see over the steering wheel driving land yachts, APD, menacing drive-by gunfire from Cadillac Escalades with "Front Chihuahua" license plates, crackheads, and most dangerous yet, hulking SUVs driven by people on cell phones.

I warn them that this harsh realm would make short work of any wide-eyed Chinese kid in a tracksuit toting a Hello Kitty Backpack. I tell them that sometime in the past decade my state was once No. 1 in the U.S. for highest per-capita pedestrian fatalities. And I say it with a smile.

Aw, home, sweet home. I miss it. Who's embellishing details?

Dave Poyer is navigating the mean streets of Beijing while teaching English to Chinese students.