Beep! Beep!

I´m here a week now and I´ve got my head around the culture pretty well. You kiss on one cheek to greet people, never refuse food if it´s offered to you and bargain hard with the market sellers. The one thing that escapes me though is what the hell the rules of the road are. It would be wrong to say there are no rules. There is definitely a system. To cross a juntion you pause, blow the horn and put the foot down kamikaze style regardless of what´s going on in the other streets. There are policemen at junctions blowing whistles randomly and cars play chicken to determine who gets into the right lane. How you know where the lane is and where it goes to is probably a Cuscuen secret that gets passed down from generation to generation at a coming of age cermony. The cars themselves remind me of the lego cars I use to build when I was young. They have no brand names and boot around the place merrily, held together by bits of baler twine and stickyback tape. I feel like I´m in Noddy episode when I get into a cab as we dodge dogs, kids and tourists, a mushroom cloud of smoke billowing behind and somehow getting to where I need to go without any major mishap. In fact the two most startling taxi episodes of my stay happened to me yesterday: one taxi driver asked me to put on a seat belt and the second actually indicated before making a right turn. Freaky.