You are driving along a country road, in the middle of nowhere.
In the vicinity of a small village of about 10 houses you have to slow down because there is a queue, and after a few meters you are not moving.
You do another 50 meters and then you are stopped again. You think there has been an accident, or the road has collapsed, or Donald Trump is visiting the village.
Something serious and unexpected.
You wait, you are very nervous, your destination would be close, but you are stuck, you are in this queue that moves very slowly. After about ten minutes you are finally inside the village and the cause of the slowdown is revealed to you. Someone has simply parked the car in front of his house, and the road, which is already narrow, becomes alternating one-way.
Nothing prevents from parking in the middle of the street.
Every day a queue is formed because of that car, but nobody says anything and that's okay.
THEY quietly queue (they queue, we remember for the inattentive reader), they don't honk, they do absolutely nothing, unperturbed.
WE have a dry throat for swearing, we have a fit.
Of course, it's normal, how can we understand... we come from Naples, Milan, Tunis... from places where if you do something like this, someone will slash your tires, will engrave obscene shapes on the hood. We come from places where, if when the green lights go out you are still there, they honk you, they insult you, they curse your mother….
How can we understand the Zen monk calmness that those people have when driving?
Another example.
In Cambridge there are some very narrow streets around my house and to avoid too large vehicles to access, there are narrow passages (see photo). These are iron gates, literally covered with the colored paint of all the cars that rubbed the door, because in fact the passage is very narrow.
Actually, I pass very quickly and I don't understand all that drama, but most people take an infinite time, and then there are long queues. Sometimes someone gets stuck and blocks half the city.
I see this show every day of my life, and never, I mean never, I heard honking or shouting at people who either:
1) should have learned to pass through that bottleneck by now, OR
2) if they believe that it is impossible to pass smoothly should have asked to remove it. Tertium non datur.
But again, how can we comment? Where we live such stuff would last two hours, then someone (rightly) goes there and dismantles that shitty gate with pickaxes.
THEY are very calm, they wait, they go at 20, they arrange themselves in one lane when there would be two, they continuously form very long queues.
There are traffic lights that last up to 5 minutes.
We play a game with my son when we are stopped at the eternal traffic lights: we imagine going to meet those who are in the car in front of us, chatting with them, playing chess, reading parts of the Divine Comedy together... there is also a romantic version in which I marry the other driver after a long engagement at the traffic light...
The apex of the misunderstanding between me and THEM is reached when, at a crossroad where I do NOT have priority, they stop to let me pass with a lovely friendly smile.
I get so pissed off: I've already stopped, don't stop too, otherwise everything is blocked, and there is a queue, it is abnormal to want a queue!!!!
We do not understand, we are ticked off.
But do you want to know the truth?
I say this in a low voice so as not to sound monarchical: our behaviour on the streets is hysterical and uncivilized.
Now I said it.
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