Realities of Foreign Service Life: Traffic

I’ve decided to revive my “Realities of Foreign Service Life” series — at least for this post. I should preface this all by saying that my commute this evening took 40 minutes. To go approximately 4 miles. You read that right — 4 miles in 40 minutes. As in a 10-minute mile. Or what I do on a treadmill. So you can probably see where this is headed.

There’s been a lot of new road construction here lately, mostly work on two new roundabouts in our area.  But they got it all opened up in time for the start of the school year last week. And it went so well that it warranted this in Monday’s newspaper:

An official “introduction” to the new 6-legged roundabout! We tried to use this thing on Saturday to get to the movies and it was not pretty. In fact, it required two full laps of the roundabout. Of course, that was before we got our 16-step instructions on roundabout use.

And in case words aren’t your thing, there is a diagram with color-coded cars:

Realistically, this thing is going to be a mess until they get construction completely done. (They should have spent another week or two on, oh, I don’t know, completing all of the lanes in this diagram before they opened it, in my opinion.) Well, it’s still going to be a mess after that. There are just too many cars on too small an island to make traffic flow smoothly. I’m just waiting for my new Kindle to arrive so that I at least have something to do during my commute. Don’t worry — it’s safe when you have the car in Park anyway.