on driving

I feel like my status updates usually tell it all: Driving is more like the flow of water here than anything else. Lanes quickly appear and disappear, as do other cars and especially scooters. Pulling away from the stoplight the other day, I was suddenly overtaken by a flock of 15 or 20 scooters, and their movement was erratic but somehow collective, like birds flying. My friend P. was driving directly in front of me, and she said to herself, don't look at the scooters, don't look at the scooters. We made it to the mall without creating roadkill.

P. said it best when she said that todo es intuicion. If there is a space, then you fill the space. If there is a left turn lane, but you can create your own from the middle lane, then do it. People also do that to me as I'm heading out onto the street from a parking lot. A car will pull up alongside, and then quickly turn out in front, while my pansy-a** self is still waiting for a break in the traffic. People incessantly fill spaces around me.

Mostly it is the lane changes that are surprising. Instead of having a separate lane, the left lane _is_ the turn lane whenever there's an intersection. So if you drive on the left inevitably you get stuck behind a line of cars wanting to turn, whereas the right lane charges on. Of course, you could drive in the right lane, but it's slower, technically the scooter lane and it's hard to drive with a one pacing you a foot to the right. So people slip back and forth between lanes, changing so often that there's not much of a point in using the turn signal.

Lanes also turn suddenly... the paint for the lane all of a sudden makes 45 degree spurt, and unless you're paying close attention to the lines, all of a sudden you're drifting into another lane, just like everyone else. There are sudden lane merges, such as at an intersection where there are two lanes on one side and one on the other, effectively rendering the merge at the middle of the intersection. And you can't pay close attention to the lines, because you're too busy looking up at the signal lights, which are horizontal and go from red, yellow, green, yellow, red. That means that yellow could be either slow down or get ready to go, and if you're not watching steadily then you don't know which. Also, they turn off the signal lights later at night so they just flash yellow yellow yellow and you can meander (or charge, depending on how taiwanese you are) through the intersections. So who knows what yellow really means.*

But amidst all of this whining, I have to admit that I am turning into a Taiwanese driver... I think I might have been a little in the first place, as it's almost intuicion to turn when there are no cars, rather than waiting for an insignificant turn signal. And my lane changes have always been swishy. I got it from mah momma, whose lane changes are accompanied by a rush of g-force. It's kind of nice to know that my mother's idiosyncracies that have an origin. It's the whole country, not just her.

*But really, who knows what yellow really means?