Still searching for secret shortcuts.

Wow I had fun biking to work today. And I think I might have cut a few seconds off of my previous best time. Maybe I put too much sugar in my morning tea.

Here,the general rule for people on bikes is to stay on the right hand edge of the road. The faster the vehicle, the more toward the center of the road it goes. Something that has happened to me more than once: as I was passing a slower person on a bicycle, there was a motorcycle passing the moped that was passing me. This sort of thing can only happen, of course, when there happens to be nobody on the half of the road meant for traffic going the other direction (I don’t want to use the word lane, since there are hardly ever lines on the road).

During fairly heavy traffic hours (daytime), there are always plenty of things along the right hand edge of the road you need to dodge. Look over your shoulder, make sure there’s nobody coming up right behind you to prevent you from swerving around the car that’s driven partway into the street as it tries to force its way out of a driveway and into traffic. Then peek back again to make sure you can move left enough to pass the donkey cart that’s leaving entirely too much unused space to the right of it. Then quickly glance back to see that it’s safe to move over for the guy driving directly at you, having decided to drive on the left shoulder of the road for a block since he didn’t want to have to wait to cut through traffic for his left hand turn. Look back once more before passing the woman walking along with a bowl of bananas atop her head. (never mind that there’s more than enough space to walk directly beside this paved road)

Really, it reminds me of a video game. A classic racing game. Coming from a place where there are sidewalks for pedestrians and a police force that prevents people from driving along on the wrong side of the road, it seems to me as though many of these things I have to dodge are out of place; it makes no sense for them to be there. They’ve simply been placed there by programmers who wanted to give players a few extra obstacles to spice things up. I can imagine the conversations of the game designers:
“What else can put in the way?”
“How about goats.”
“Hahaha. I love it! Goats! Let’s call the guys in graphics to make sure that won’t take too long. “
“And how about speed boosts?’
“Nah. Too fun. Speed bumps!”

It’s not the best game – it’s one of those games that can be tedious after a little while, but since there’s no way of saving your progress and coming back later, you feel obliged to continue until you arrive at the checkpoint. I happen to be quite good at this particular game - not a single crash to date. As of yet, my basic curiosity has been overridden by my tendency to always try for a high score: I haven’t bothered to find out how many extra lives you get.