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Pastimes : NNBM - SI Branch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (27249)	6/26/2003 10:33:58 PM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 104197

sharing your stories Isn't that, a few grubs and the weather (BTW it was officially 102, today), what we do in this cantina. a great car How about I give you some car stories? Swedes, seeing the Swedish license plates would assume I was Swedish, and address me accordingly. Given the prevalence among Swedes for understanding English (My Swedish is almost non-existent.), there was never a problem. Never a problem until they made the “big switch”. When I first arrived in Sweden, they were still driving on the “wrong” (= British side of the road). When I arrived back in Sweden later that summer, they had just made the switch. Everyone was driving especially carefully. Some the Swedish drivers, seeing my license plates, took exception to me driving, as though I had always driven on this “new” side of the road. On a ferry across the Bosporus at Istanbul, I noticed a large Volvo truck. Since this was long before Volvo started shipping trucks to North America, I must have been starring at the truck. The driver, a large man dressed in an old soiled T-shirt, and who looked like the international version of one of Hoffa’s boyz, saw my stare. Even though all of the vehicles on the ferry were packed together, he opened the truck’s door, stood on the running board, pointed to the Volvo sign on the front of his truck, pointed to my car, and then gave a “thumbs up”. I understood and returned his signal, which resulted in a laugh. Since then, I’ve marveled that what I had always considered a Roman hand signal had survived in this old capital of the Eastern Roman Empire after five and a half centuries of Turkish rule. Maybe I should think more about Pirsig’s pattern persistence. lurqer