| Learning to Drive in Panama |
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| Written by Matt Landau | ||
| Thursday, March 06 2008 | ||
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"Why the fuck do we need to learn this?" I remember the
class clown once asking our English teacher who had required us to memorize a
long, yet insignificant act from the famous play Othello; a lesson which I left
wanting only to change my name to Iago. I was shocked however that our teacher
even entertained the question. "Why, Jacob?" she said while tapping her foot on the floor. "Why? Because learning beautiful acts like these will improve your grammar. And as we all know, the words you choose say something about your character." This got a rise out of the class. "But my dad has bad grammar" Jacob responded. "And he makes more than you do." We all nodded our heads in agreement. He was right. I enjoyed interchanges like this, but more so took pleasure from classes like Driver's Education because, as Jacob might have put it, it was one of the classes we'd fucking need to learn. Driver's Ed was taught by a man no taller than a yard stick; a bondafide dwarf. And while it humored my classmates and I to think that he could possibly drive better than us people of normal height, the mini professor often responded with threatening words. "You drive my golf cart into that wall" he once screamed, "and I'll put this clipboard so far up your ass, you'll need a rear view mirror to get it out!" Despite a serious blow to my self esteem when he dubbed me The Kid Who'll Never Drive, I graduated Driver's Ed and eventually went on to pay fabricated respect to a number of idiots who stood between me and my plastic license to drive. "That's a wonderful dress" I told the fat, walrus woman who was responsible for my road lessons, hoping that it might get me my letter of certification before the kid in the back seat who shuffled through a stack of popular role-playing cards before announcing that Oona's Black Guard didn't have to take driving lessons because he or she could move objects with their nose. "You're so sweet. You think so?" was her response. "I got this dress for my birthday last year but don't wear it much because of the ketchup stains. Make sure you use your turning signal when switching lanes. Did you hear me? Make sure you show the other drivers that you are switching lanes!" This group, the driving instructors, were a rare and classy bunch, oftentimes trying to inhale fast food or sell Cutco knives between red lights. And it was strange, I always thought, that such a loser group of people could hold so much influence on ones future. Little things like yield signs and hand positioning on the wheel were of the utmost importance to them, while normally integrating with society and talking without food in their mouth, had clearly taken a backseat. Driving in Panama can be difficult seeing as though people here are freaking lunatics. Lanes are rarely used and general traffic laws are rarely observed: an atmosphere that can, no pun intended, drive you, the visiting foreigner, nuts. Accidents happen here on a regular basis although beneath the wild and crazy impression you might get if you've never seen this sort of thing before, are actually a relatively skilled population of drivers who, although it may not look like it, oftentimes know what they're doing. Panama City is not unlike other crowded places where proximity to the next car is heightened and traditional patterns are not practiced. But moves you might believe at home to be illegal are embraced openly here. "Just drive through the gas station" Jianella once told me as a solution to get around a back-up on Calle 50. But when finding the gas station shortcut to be blocked, she simply suggested I drive on the sidewalk. Brilliant. Much of the country's traffic patterns were laid out by the USA occupation, but have amusingly been tweaked in the name of Panamanian ingenuity: take for example, the on- ramp which was converted (as soon as the US left) into a three-lane parking area, or the four-way stop sign which now serves as a confused four-way traffic fork. Driving in Panama is not terrible compared to other South American counterparts, and especially in the interior, it sure as hell beats our northern neighbors of Costa Rica. The process of getting a license is relatively painless too, surprisingly as long as you have a valid license from your home country. It's as if members of the Panamanian DMV know the procedure I went through and realized, as if adopting an experienced show dog, I've been trained only by the best.
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| Last Updated ( Thursday, March 06 2008 ) | ||
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