Tuesday 28 February 2012

Stop!

Rightio, here's my first positive observation about Newfoundland.

In every other place I've lived in or visited (and there's been a few), when you stand at the side of the street with the intention of crossing the road, you wait until there are no cars around.  Or you go to a pedestrian crossing so that the cars will stop for you (though this doesn't work in Rome - your best bet when crossing the road there is to just run like a mad thing and hope you make it to the other side of the road alive).


Not in Newfoundland.

Nuh-uh.  Here, you can stand at the side of a busy 4 lane highway, and the cars will stop, that's right, totally stop, and then wait for you to cross the road.  In town, you probably only need to wait for about 3 or 4 cars to go past before they stop and let you walk across in front of them.  I still run, it's just part of my scaredy, I-can't-quite-believe-these-cars-are-stopping-for-me nature.

The first couple of times this happened it totally freaked me out.  I even experienced stage fright at having to cross the road in front of people.  This has long since passed, and I now get annoyed when the cars don't stop straight away.

That's nice, and it definitely doesn't happen anywhere else that I've been to.

So that's my first 'Thing I love about Newfoundland'.  Hopefully it won't be too long until I share my next 'thing' with you.

No comments:

Post a Comment