M, I have felt weird walking in the USA where there is almost nobody walking in many places. They are in dirty great SUVs roaring along. When in Rome, doing differently from what the Romans are doing, it does feel strange. Like driving around with Canadian number plates and a melanin-deficient face in a totally negro part of a USA city with Canadian feels peculiar. One's thought is "How come I'm the only one here?" closely followed by "I wonder if it means my safety is not as great as it might be".
Decades ago, MAD Magazine did an item about Americans' love of living in cars leading to legs as vestigial organs, with Americans looking like the "push over and they roll up again" pear-shaped toys. I bet you could find people in the USA driving to the mail box at the end of the driveway, though most wouldn't need to walk, or drive, as they get their mail via cyberspace.
Walking and feeling strange doing it is like wearing no clothes downtown [in a dream, not that I've done it in reality]. One feels exposed and insecure. Going 18 times around an aircraft would draw the attention of the passengers and the anti-terrorist gunman and the paranoid authoritarian mindless crew who would surely pull out a stun gun. An aircraft is more confined than a ship's promenade deck so "walking" is not quite the same locomotion mode. It would involve a lot of "excuse me".
I walk quite a lot. As do others in our family.
On mall parking, I realized in 1975 after moving to Ottawa and experiencing mall life for the first time, that parking in the first carpark on entering the mall is best. On our first trip, we drove in and only after getting close to the building did we realize we had driven into a traffic jam. Mad people cruise up and down close to the entrances looking for a parking space, taking 10 minutes to park. Okay, that's probably a slight exaggeration, but it's far longer than my patience allows.
A couple of months ago, I found myself stuck in a school carpark in Vista as hordes of parents created a self-locking jam and it took, truly, half an hour to get out. We had arrived 15 minutes early to collect a pupil so parked in a wide-open carpark and went for a wander around to inspect the relatively new premises and for me to see the school. Then the pupils came flooding out and we went back to the car to find carnage. People were driving in, people couldn't drive out, those in the thick of it were headed off by those closer to the entrance/exit. Normally I'm astute enough to predict such things and avoid them. My sister-in-law is one of those who gets stuck in jams so hadn't mentioned anything about the risk of parking where we did, not thinking that the jam was anything out of the ordinary.
Even afterwards, suggesting that parking "over there", about a 3 minute walk away, would have been better, she thought it better to meet her offspring at the entrance, for safety, as there's lots of traffic "over there" and he'd [an 11 year old] have to cope with getting over there.
It was a hot day too, so it was lots of fun to see the frayed nerves and tempers as swarms of dopey, doting, parents crowded the place with monster SUVs and personnel to move 40kg of human from school to home. It's interesting to see what foreigners do in their own country. Walking and bicycling was not part of the scene.
Not even a Segway was in sight, though recently I have seen two here with schoolboys on them. Since they cost US$000s, they were obviously rich-parent toys. A good bicycle can be had for US$100 and they go faster, with no need for recharging.
Mqurice |
