I think my nose has become a faucet. I appear to have acquired a cold. Not too surprising considering that, of the 270 some odd people in my Medieval History lecture hall, probably 75% of them have been coughing their heads off through the hour-long class (an interesting topic by the way). And of course tonight I have to go to the Center of the Universe to buy a phone because the installers are coming tomorrow (FINALLY!). And why do I have to go buy a phone? Because the Royal Mail has gone on strike at the, literally, very moment all my stuff arrived from home. Granted, they have good grounds, in my opinion, for striking. But that doesn’t lessen the frustration of having all your stuff in town and out of reach!

Anyway, having to go in quest of a phone unit doesn’t please me in the least as it’s cold, rainy and, as you know, the Center of the Universe always requires at least 20 minutes extra to find a parking place. Thank God for the courtesy of Welsh drivers!

Which is actually my theme for the blog note today; Welsh drivers. For all of you in the States (or elsewhere) who have considered visiting Wales and hesitated to rent a car because of the narrow roads, I’d encourage you to rent away! Yes, the roads are narrow, very different than what we have in the States – some quite obviously were built at the time when the widest thing that had to pass another thing was a horse and buggy. But the Welsh drivers have worked out a system to deal with this. I have never met such courteous people in my life.

If you are waiting for a parking spot and you turn on your signal and sit there, no one will zip in and steal it out from under you. If there’s a line of traffic waiting to get across an intersection or roundabout, drivers will often stop and flash their lights for you to go. Or if there’s an impediment on your side of the road and you’re sitting there waiting for traffic to clear so you can go around it, a driver coming the other way often stops and flashes their lights for you to go. Just out of the blue, for no particular reason – just to be nice! Do we ever see this kind of behaviour in the States? Perhaps. But I sure haven’t.

So my hat’s off, again, to the Welsh people. I continue to find reasons why I love it here and this is just another. Warm, friendly people and honest to God random acts of kindness.

This entry was posted by Arwen on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Life in Wales, SouthWest Wales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.