Life in the fast lane, where every lane is fast

As you know, I’m still not driving here. Truck is too big and the traffic is horrendous. Makes me long for Seattle at rush hour. I’m not kidding. We either take the bus or Ralph becomes the brave driver or the Mexicano driver, whatever the traffic calls for.

I remember someone telling me as I was learning to drive that “the lines are your friends”, meaning the traffic lanes. Here, the lines for the lanes mean absolutely nothing at all!! Drivers here can take two lanes and easily squeeze in four lanes of traffic, squeeze being the key word in that phrase. Then you throw in the pedestrians, the beggars, the window washers, the car dusters, the charity collectors, the people selling everything from sunshades, to peanuts, to toys, to cheese (yep, the Mennonites here stand in intersections and sell cheese) to just about anything else you can think of. Then toss in all the motorcycles and bicycles, the buses and semis. Quite a brew. We’ve had so many close calls it’s just flat amazing, but praise the Lord, we have come out unscathed so far and pray that continues.

Then you have the folks turning left from the far right lane and right from the far left lane. Motorcycles and bicycles who use red lights to move to the front of the pack. People who ignore lights and signs completely whether walking or driving.

Then there are the delivery motorcycles. These guys are really crazy because they are on a schedule!! Motorcycles are used to deliver food from pizzerias and restaurants, drugs from pharmacies, package delivery, tortillas at your door, even cans of paint from the paint store. The motorcycle guys also drive around our neighborhood with a stack of invoices on the gas tank, delivering the bills to residences around here.

And the riders have very creative uses for their helmets. They hold them between their thighs over the gas tank. They have them bungied down behind their seat. Often you’ll see them driving along with their forearm through the open face of the helmet and their hand coming out the neck hole, holding on to the handlebars. When they have them on their heads they often are over baseball caps and are unbuckled. Sometimes backwards, again, unbuckled. If they have a passenger, often the passenger will be holding the helmet because they are sitting where it would normally be stored.

They join with the much slower tricycle crowd and can quickly fill every crevice in the streets between traffic. The tricycle folks have a single wheel in the back and two wheels with a small cart in between in the front. They are kind of like the poorer mans pickup. The guy who does our neighbors garden across the street has one of these, filled with his lawnmower, weed eater and assorted tools of his trade. We’ve seen guys hauling their families around in them. One guy in the neighborhood sells pastries from his. A million uses for these little non-motorized vehicles.

But Ralph has adapted pretty well and Carmen has officially dubbed him a Mexican driver. He can weave in and out of the smallest gaps in traffic, he can read what’s coming from the other drivers. He’s got the shortcuts down. He waits patiently as all the motorcycles and bicycles that have crowded ahead of him get rolling once the light has changed. He has even learned to negotiate our big truck through the smallest, tightest little one way streets you could ever imagine. He even has the nice, but firm, finger wag down to wave off the window washers, et al, who come up to the car at every major intersection in town. It’s truly amazing.