I No Longer Fear Death, For I Have Driven in Spain

(Well, I didn’t drive as such, but I was a passenger in a car in Spain.)

Our first day in Madrid was stunning;

Little did we realise the perilous journey we were about to undertake. In hindsight, we really only almost died the one time, which is pretty impressive, and Jo did an amazing job. But to begin with it was a bit hairy. For a start, there’s the driving on the right thing, which just feels really unnatural. Jo refrained from telling me at the time, but he did later say that he had a hard time stopping himself from pulling onto the other side of the road.

We made it through Madrid well enough, then onto the highway. Only to realise that we’d done a loop and were back more or less where we started. Our second attempt was much better, in that we actually made it onto the right road (though I have been told that getting out of Madrid on only the second attempt is actually quite good for a novice).

But even more than the driving on the right thing is the Spanish drivers thing. They seem to see little things like speed limits and lane markings as optional, and I don’t just mean that people drive fast. It’s that everyone seems to have been given a different, random speed limit for the day, so there were some people driving at about 80km/h, and some driving at 150km/h on roads marked at 120km/h, with people seeming to think that they should choose a lane based on aesthetic choice, and not practicality. Oh, and also, some people use their indicators in the traditional manner, to show which direction they are about to move in (i.e. left signal equals an intention to move to the left), whereas some people use them to show the direction they are coming from (i.e. left signal equals an intention to move to the right). Sometimes people use their indicators to show that it is safe to overtake. And some people just keep them on because the little clicking noise they make soothes them, which is the only reason I can think of that one car we sat behind for half an hour on the highway never once turned off his left signal.

When I wasn’t rigid with terror, I took some photos of the countryside, which is really too rugged to be called beautiful as such. Rather, it has a certain blasted, rough charm that really grows on you the more you look at it, and what it lacks in beauty it makes up for by being sweeping and dramatic. (Apologies for the quality of the pictures, but they were taken from a moving car.)