Taking Turns

My expat friends in Belgium, always complained to me about the road rage of Belgian drivers. I guess I never drove on the Ring (highway) there as much as I do here, but I just never saw that. Not compared to here. For the most part, I always found that Belgian drivers were especially courteous.

For example, at our new school. We don't have a bus, and there are 900 students at our school (of course, keep in mind that it is a Catholic school, so there are some really big families). In any event, there are a lot of cars trying to turn down the same street at the same time. My first week of school, images from the 80's movie Mr. Mom, kept flashing into my mind. Do you remember the scene where he takes the kids to school and the kids keep telling him, "You're doing it wrong." And the other moms are screaming at him, "South to drop off, north to pick-up you moron!" Well, that's what I felt like our first week of school.

But anyway. In Belgium, whenever there was a back-up of traffic, drivers would just naturally take turns. There, unlike here, there was usually only one way to get somewhere. In Europe, roads grew organically from well traveled paths and ancient highways that led from town to town. Here, early American city planners had enough space to plot everything on a logical grid. The result there, is that you have to wait in traffic. A lot. And sometimes it's for something as stupid as a delivery truck that decides to block an entire (or sometimes both) lanes of traffic. It's almost like sense of camaraderie develops. An attitude that "we're all in the together, let's work it out together". With a collective disgust for the delivery truck driver, of course.

That doesn't happen so much here. A few weeks ago, a large delivery truck was blocking a lane of traffic on our route to school. We saw it in time to change course, turn down the next street, drive one block down, and get around it easily. Drivers that could foresee the upcoming challenge, get themselves around it, were rewarded with a minimal delay. The drivers who didn't realize there was a problem until it was too late to turn, were stuck. And I found myself thinking, "it sucks to be them."

On the way into school, we turn right down the "west to drop-off" street. And obviously, because we are turning right, we have the right of way. There is always a line of cars waiting to turn left. I always let a car from the left lane go before me, just like I learned from driving in Belgium. But no one else ever does. This amazes me. Especially because we are all parents of kids at the same Catholic school. Which sort of makes me think we should follow higher standards of courtesy or something. Not to mention we're all going to see each other in the parking lot in a minute.

My Belgian and/or French friends would say this is an example of Americans being rude. (They say that a lot.) But I don't think that's it, exactly. I just think that in the mornings especially, we are so focused on where we are going and what we are doing, that we don't always pay attention to what's going on around us. But maybe we should pay attention a little more? So that we can take turns if we need to.

Monkey would be able to tell you how many times I've said to myself (out loud, so of course the kids were eavesdropping): "I can't believe no one here takes turns, I need to blog about this." Because I said it enough that he started counting.

So now that school is out, and our mornings are quiet again, I can cross "blog about taking turns" off my end of the school year list.

Coming up next: Reasons I'm a Terrible Soccer Mom.