it sounds like there are a considerable number of white expats there, then. so what is their demographic, would you say? and are they business investors, or aid workers, or what is the draw to Coutonou?



why do you think this type of produce is so rare? just that nobody can afford to buy items with relatively little tradition, or they don't have a place in the local cuisine, or is the production difficult, or what?

9/12/2014 9:58:11 AM

They're mostly aid workers, or they're supervising construction projects that are beyond the local capacity (this includes anything that doesn't involve cinder blocks). I've never encountered a business investor here. The draw to Cotonou is that it is the de facto seat of government and is the only place in Benin where you can find certain amenities.

The produce is rare for several reasons. One, rarity makes it expensive Two, there isn't a lot of seed stock, and the seeds cost a buttload. Three, African culture is by and large resistant to change, and people here do not embrace new food types too eagerly. Four, as a producer, you are conservative for several reasons, starting with the culture and ending with the fact that you can't afford to take risks. If you're operating just barely above subsistence, you can't really switch over to growing cucumbers and hope for the best.

9/12/2014 10:27:57 AM

This past weekend had some surreal elements to it. Most Saturdays have at least a little of that, because the US ambassador opens his pool to PCVs for a few hours in the afternoon. We eagerly take advantage of that, and sitting in his large, cold, immaculate pool surrounded by well-kept grounds is nothing if not surreal to somebody who has lived in Benin for 800+ days.

After that I wandered around, having some time to kill. I found a small Japanese restaurant just off the road from where 100% of the town's other non-African restaurants are. Instead of a menu they handed me an android tablet. I never experienced this in the states, so it was bizarre by itself, but more surprising was that the pictures actually were of the food.

Everyone talks about how shitty this is at home, when the Wendy's burger on the commercial looks nothing like the Wendy's burger you got at the drive-thru, but Benin does not even have the pretense of trying to depict the food you will get. They seriously just get on the internet and download pictures of the platonic ideal of various dishes -- frequently, the menu pictures still have a watermark on them from an image hosting site. And of course a lot of times, the items pictured on the sign are not and never were available at the restaurant. They just looked pretty.

Anyway, I was the only person there other than a couple of JICA kids (JICA being the Japanese Peace Corps), but I sat down and ordered honey teriyaki chicken and white rice. It was sublime. The sauce was...if you put that sauce on John Goodman's ass, I cannot swear to you that I would not eat it. Unfortunately, it cost $11 for a "meal" that, in America, might do for an appetizer.

I left there and went to happy hour, where I got a drink with a friend (my girlfriend being out of town). We were joined by a 50 year old African-American who was trying very hard to look like a 17 year old African-American, complete with do-rag, Raiders cap, and Raiders jersey. He sexually harassed my friend and then wandered off, singing in German.

The night ended with me going, begrudgingly, to a club that was having a live performance by a (supposedly) well-known Beninese artist. Most music here is terrible, but all my friends were going, so I tagged along.

Thank God. That band blew the doors off the place. It was honest-to-Christ rock-and-roll, which I have never heard from a Beninese group, let alone a Beninese woman. Oh, did I not mention that? It was a chick. A tiny African lady, backed up by a really shockingly competent band, proceeded to rock our balls off for two hours. I want to buy her CDs, and possibly father her children.

The next day I went to a cookout at an expat's house and was repeatedly raped by a rhodesian ridgeback (yay accidental alliteration!) while being fed kebabs and beer. Then my girlfriend returned and I posted in the "I just had some good goddamn sex" thread of life.

All of these events have highlighted how really unpleasant Monday is, beginning with the girlfriend's cat eating my lunch, slashing my legs, and keeping me up all night and ending with my boss yelling at me for telling her I have to go on my Peace Corps mandated home leave in November.

9/15/2014 9:36:59 AM

That sounds pretty cool... I'd kinda like to know what Beninese rock sounds like.

9/15/2014 1:57:57 PM

I applied last night for a job somewhere in Africa. I don't know what country...my guess is more Horn of Africa area, though.

9/15/2014 5:15:58 PM

gee i wonder what that job could be

9/15/2014 7:49:29 PM

He's gonna be a priest

9/15/2014 9:13:55 PM

I'm uploading some clips of the concert to instagram. They're from my phone so not great, but some of them are entertaining (especially when the lead singer is going apeshit)

Quote :

"I don't know what country...my guess is more Horn of Africa area, though."

Horn of Africa is a good guess for al Shabab/AQAP and some piracy, though actually my area is where a lot of the pirate focus has shifted. We've had marines come through on missions to evaluate and combat that threat.

There's also ongoing opportunity to shoot terrorists in Mali, Niger, and Nigeria.

Being a military contractor in Africa is a growth industry.

9/16/2014 3:49:45 AM

Yep, plenty of humans to hunt in HoA, and it's a jumping off point for Yemen, too. Djibouti also has a large base at Camp Lemonnierre. I think that al Shabaab is prob one of the main focal points.

Of course, there's Boku Harem in Nigeria, hunt for Kony and LRA (that's dwindling though, right?), and I've heard of stuff going on in Uganda and Burkina Faso. This isn't the job I need long term, but I'd love to go do it for a little while. That it pays a shitload is just a bonus.

[Edited on September 17, 2014 at 8:46 PM. Reason : Yeah big growth. People don't realize how much the US is doing across Africa. It's kinda kept quiet]

9/17/2014 8:44:22 PM

Can you please make a thread called:

"So I guess I'm going to be a merc in Africa for two years"

???

Send the material to GrumpyGOP though first so he can put it in proper comedic format.

9/17/2014 8:50:57 PM

Haha I expect that if I do it, there won't be much I can talk about, and not much will be comedic.

But come on, gimme some credit, I can be pretty funny! I'll concede, though...grunpygop is a master at that.

[Edited on September 17, 2014 at 9:01 PM. Reason : Prob comedic shit back at camp and in the ready room, though]

9/17/2014 9:00:30 PM

Here are some expat notes:

As my group was arriving in 2012, a member of the outgoing group decided to stay in Cotonou and start a business with a friend from home who flew out to join him. That friend's name is Jake. Jake went to MIT and is a pretty sharp guy, but he had no French or experience with Africa.

Anyway, Jake came out, and these guys started a distillery.

http://tambour-original.com/

They make sodabi, the local moonshine. Kind of. It is distilled to actual standards (as opposed to just in an oil drum out in a field), and it's aged with a bunch of ingredients that he won't list, and the result is...actually kind of shitty. I don't care for the stuff. It tastes like ersatz whiskey and costs 9000 francs a liter. Regular sodabi tastes more like a standard grain alcohol and costs 600 francs a liter. But anyway, the stuff is already in some of the nicer supermarkets and bars around town, and he's hoping to eventually get it to America and Europe. The hope, in America at least, is that there are enough hipsters who will be impressed by the "fair trade" and "Africa" things to buy the stuff.

I'm skeptical, but what the hell, it works for Jake. And by "it works for Jake" I mean "Jake has had sex with more Peace Corps girls than any man alive." Which isn't hard when you run a liquor company. Not only is there always booze and a little bit of money around, you're constantly doing promotional events at establishments that are normally out of our price range.

As for the RPCV who helped start this venture, he went back to the states a while ago, leaving his buddy to learn French and, you know, Africa, all while figuring out a new business.

---

There are a lot of guys from the southern US working on building the new embassy here. They seem wary of Peace Corps, either because they think we're shiftless hippies (false) or because they know we're shameless moochers who will latch onto any potential source of decent food or booze (true). Plus, they have an oddly paradoxical view on living abroad. Most of them have done it for their whole adult lives, moving from one country to the next doing various US government construction projects. But most of them do not particularly enjoy being in these different countries. The construction crowd is instantly recognizable when you see them at a restaurant: they're the ones with a bunch of takeout bags, desperately rushing back to their hotel or apartment. They're a very tight-knit group, off in their own little world of peripatetic contract work.

Since they're all single men and generally don't speak French, I have no idea what they do for sex. I suppose most of the prostitutes know enough English to get the point across.

---

Having all these Americans around is good in most ways, but it has drawbacks that bode poorly for my trip home. A lot of these people have kids. These kids speak English. I've spent the last two years swearing at kids in English. It is a hard habit to break.

Speaking of my trip home, I land in Greensboro on November 22 and I fly back out on January 1. If any Greensboro wolfweb people want to get a beer or something, let me know. A trip to Raleigh is probably also in the cards.

9/18/2014 6:12:32 AM

My ex flew out to Senegal today to start her PC term. We broke up a couple months ago when she started traveling the US to see people and say bye for a while. I'm pretty bummed that despite her claims of wanting to see me before she flew out, she has stopped talking to me for now. I've been following this thread for a while, but it has been hard because it always reminded me of the inevitable end to my relationship. I wonder where her head is at, because it wasn't a sour breakup.

/emo

9/19/2014 11:46:19 PM

Sorry to hear that, man. Peace Corps has a bad habit of doing that.

There are people who try to make a go of it long distance, of course. To my shock, it even works sometimes. Not that I was very happy about it working, early in my service. I was the only male in a region populated almost entirely by gorgeous women who were in successful long-distance relationships. The "almost" refers to my girlfriend, who at first I did not consider dating because she is frighteningly smarter than I am.

There are also those couples who try the "open relationship" solution to Peace Corps separation. This has worked out predictably. One guy got emotionally attached to a volunteer he was hooking up with and, I think out of guilt, proposed to the girl back home. Another girl banged half her training class before her guy said, "Uh, this open relationship business isn't really working."

One girl did exactly what yours did, breaking it off just before she left. Only then she wouldn't shut up about the guy, and they talk on the phone a lot, and apparently he's coming to visit her in Africa. Or some shit. I don't know, we don't really pay much attention to her anymore, because all she talks about is this dude.

Another girl has her boyfriend send her $60 a month so she can buy enough internet credit to skype every single day. We call this "codependency."

9/22/2014 3:47:57 AM

Here are some Africa rumors. Note that the President of Benin is Yayi Boni. That isn't essentially to understanding these rumors but I think it's a funny name.

---

"The new helmet law was passed because Yayi Boni's wife is the one that sells all the helmets."

So this woman has access to all the corruption opportunities available to a head of state, and she decides to monopolize the helmet trade?

"Burkina Faso has a technology that creates rain but they refuse to share it with us."

Burkina Faso is a Sahel country with less rain than us and approximately zero scientists or technology, but no matter.

"Barack Obama was born in Africa."

Who would have thought that Donald Trump would have so much in common with Beninese peasants? Though I bet they'd be better at running casinos.

---

Every week we have a staff meeting. It might as well be a bunch of cats stuffed into a sack. Although the western staff meeting should be an easy analogue to typical African decision-making paradigms -- everybody having a chance to speak so a consensus can be reached and all that crap -- for some reason an office environment turns everybody into an asshole that tries to talk at once.

Imagine you walk into a room with a bunch of seven-year-olds and a broken lamp. You ask what happened. The resulting bedlam is pretty much my Monday morning.

These meetings also tend to wander pretty far afield. I drift out of most of them -- they're conducted in French, and 93% of what is on the agenda has nothing to do with me. But occasionally I'll drift back in to hear them discussing the hunting and mating habits of Sarah Palin, or the ice bucket challenge, or Christ only knows what.

---

I tried to contribute to the last meeting. We were talking about ebola. The boss wants to come up with a novel but effective intervention we can do to prevent it from arriving or spreading in Benin. Everybody talked about hand washing and public awareness.

These things are great, don't get me wrong, but Peace Corps, JICA, and about 500 other organizations have spent the last half-century teaching people in Benin about hand washing. It has accomplished dick-all. And everybody from the ministry of health on down to PC trainees is teaching people about ebola symptoms. I suggested something everybody else was ignoring, something that I believe is a unique and highly dangerous threat to Benin.

Bush taxis.

All of our neighboring countries have (and actually enforce) laws to restrict the number of passengers in a taxi to the number that the taxi was built to hold. Not so Benin, where you take the factory-intended capacity and add at least three. These people are forced into contact so close and personal that it makes flying coach -- next to Kevin Smith -- look roomy. The contact is close enough for bodily fluids like sweat to be exchanged easily, and in a Beninese bush taxi, there's gonna be a LOT of sweat. Plus, you're sharing this cramped space with animals, dead and alive. Taxi drivers love to pull over and buy freshly-slaughtered (potentially infectious) bush meat.

My proposal, which I never really got to deliver, was an information campaign targeted specifically at taxi drivers' unions (of which all drivers must be a member), explaining to taxi drivers that letting sick people into their cabs might kill them. I wanted to couple this with a radio campaign urging people not to share taxis with those who appeared to be sick, and to threaten to boycott drivers who tried to bring in sick people.

But before I could propose this, everyone else at the table started laughing uproariously at my description of the Beninese taxi experience. All of these guys are rich by Benin standards and have their own vehicles; they haven't taken a taxi in years. The idea that I had to was so hysterical, they thought it was a joke.

9/23/2014 6:11:02 AM

TLDR

have you left Africa yet?

9/23/2014 6:25:03 AM

Fuck you.

9/23/2014 6:44:58 AM

^^TLDR

have you left your African yet?

9/23/2014 8:40:44 AM

Whatever. OK, now we can begin the process of you people helping me get home.

Question One: How Can I Buy Stuff (Booze) On My Flight Home?

I don't have a working card with me in Africa, and mailing my new credit card from home to here is asking for it to get stolen by a mailman and sold to Nigerians. Normally this is no problem because exactly three establishments in Benin take plastic. However, I seem to recall that you can no longer buy drinks with cash on airplanes. I think Air France will give me the free wine hookup en route to de Gaulle, but from there I've got to fly Delta to Detroit, and I'll be goddamned if I'm flying from the asshole of Europe to the Anus of America sober.

Question Two: Has anything earth-shaking happened to the Bojangles menu? Please God, no.

Question Three: Are there any weird new foods I need to know about? I have heard of the cronut but do not understand it and fear what other chimeras it may portend.

[Edited on September 23, 2014 at 9:09 AM. Reason : ]

9/23/2014 8:46:17 AM

should be free wine on international delta flight too

9/23/2014 9:29:53 AM

Quote :

"Has anything earth-shaking happened to the Bojangles menu? "

Bojangles went out of business.

9/23/2014 9:33:44 AM

only in Raleigh, he can just go outside of Raleigh for Bojangles

9/23/2014 9:42:25 AM

TWW is a bit salty today, I see.

OK, so free wine on international flights. Got it. I assume that there isn't really anything else I would want to buy on an airplane (well, OK, whiskey, but I'll take what I can get).

Stephen Colbert and Craig Ferguson are still doing their old jobs until the end of the year, right?

9/23/2014 10:26:25 AM

You can use Paypal to generate temporary credit card numbers (pulling $ from your Paypal account), but I don't know if you could use said number to purchase whisky on a plane, or if they would want the actual card.

9/23/2014 11:41:08 AM

Sucks that your taxi idea didn't get the attention you had hoped for. Seems pretty legit to me. I guess being hilarious has its drawbacks. :/

The only thing I've recently discovered about Bojo is they are pretty tasty salads for $5.

9/23/2014 12:17:25 PM

Quote :

"Imagine you walk into a room with a bunch of seven-year-olds and a broken lamp. You ask what happened. The resulting bedlam is pretty much my Monday morning."

Lol, sounds like some dialogue from a Jason Bateman movie. Seriously, have you ever thought about being a screenplay writer?

9/23/2014 12:22:15 PM

i could see that taxi idea backfiring pretty easily, with someone coughing mid-ride and getting booted out into the middle of nowhere by the driver

9/23/2014 12:44:32 PM

I actually did think about that, or a version of it. In the early stages, ebola looks a lot like malaria. Malaria is very common but it isn't contagious, so it's possible that a lot of malarial folks would get turned back needlessly.

My rationale was, firstly, that slowing the spread of ebola was top priority, and worth the inconvenience for a small number of travelers. Secondly, if anybody has malaria or something and absolutely needs to travel, there are options besides bush taxis. They can take a moto taxi, or rent out an entire car -- more expensive, certainly, but still possible.

---

Moving to Cotonou has, predictably, precipitated some sudden weight gain. I'm back at my normal American weight of around 220, which means a moderate gut on my 6'6" frame. As a result of eating and drinking everything I could in the weeks preceding my departure, I actually landed in Africa at 235.

The first day, the doctor weighed me. He said, "You are slightly overweight. I think that your pre-service training will take care of this." He was right. Six months later I was down to 185, the lowest weight of anybody in my family since I was around 14 years old.

So, anyway, Cotonou is making me fat. I have responded with the patented GrumpyGOP weight loss program, which has two prongs:

1) Eating plain salads for lunch, thereby being hungry and irritable all afternoon.
2) Spending slightly more money to buy Coke Zero instead of Coke Classic as my preferred booze mixer.

If that doesn't work, fuck it, I haven't finally made it out of village to eat nothing but roughage all day.

9/24/2014 3:40:16 AM

I am going to miss having somebody in my time zone to chat with

9/24/2014 4:49:42 AM

You might be able to purchase a pre-paid visa with cash in the airport terminal, if you need to buy drinks on the plane.

9/24/2014 12:06:05 PM

It's not even so much about the drinks per se, it's about not having any currency that works outside of West Africa, and dollars are kind of a pain to get in Benin. Plus with stops in Brussels (the Air France strike made them change tickets) and Dulles, I'm gonna need to buy food. So this card thing might be a good idea.

9/25/2014 9:31:05 AM

good news, should be free liquor on your international delta flight as well

just booked a delta trans-atlantic flight and noticed this:

Quote :

"Complimentary beer, wine, and spirits are offered in Economy Comfort on international flights operating between the US to/ from Canada, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and flights operating between JFK to/ from LAX, SEA, and SFO; in addition, complimentary beer, wine, and spirits are offered in the Economy cabin on all long-haul international flights."

9/30/2014 6:38:31 AM

Well hot damn, thanks for the info. Though it turns out that the Air France strike -- in spite of already being done -- spooked Peace Corps, so they switched me to a Brussels Air / United Airlines trip. On the plus side, I go Cotonou-Brussels-DC-Greensboro as opposed to Cotonou-Paris-Detroit-Greensboro, and I no longer have to fly back on New Years Day.

In other news, we moved into a new building so I now have my own office...in which to sit in silence all day. I have to keep the door closed to keep the AC in, and I have no furniture to speak of so the scene is kind of comical. Just me, sitting quietly in my dad shirt, typing away.

The scramble for ebola money continues; once they pin down a time it looks like I get to go to a big meeting at UNICEF with all of the major international players. I was selected for this task not because I am talented but because I speak English.

9/30/2014 7:18:09 AM

I THINK THAT YOU ARE TALENTED GRUMPY

9/30/2014 7:19:15 AM

You going to take this opportunity to suggest your taxi idea or just follow the guidelines given?

9/30/2014 12:26:33 PM

would wearing/requiring masks be of any help in the spread of actual ebola?

(it might also help the situation you mentioned re: people with Malaria coughing and being mistaken for an Ebola patient)

9/30/2014 3:53:05 PM

There's an ebola case in Dallas now.

Did we just beat Benin to ebola? USA #1.

9/30/2014 6:08:35 PM

WOW, Dr. Sanjay Gupta predicted that this would definitely happen on live TV when everybody else was still murmuring about Ebola. Credit points to him.

9/30/2014 6:15:00 PM

Is anybody really surprised it made it to America? I'm not, and I still believe any sort of outbreak will be quickly contained since we luckily live in a first world country.

9/30/2014 6:21:50 PM

ppl not in first a world country consider that racist.

[Edited on September 30, 2014 at 6:36 PM. Reason : just fyi when talking to an Indian]

9/30/2014 6:31:27 PM

It wouldn't take more than 1 or 2 mistakes or lies for it to be less than contained though.

When the primary response is quarantine, it's basically waiting to see if you'll die or not, once you get it.

9/30/2014 6:44:20 PM

Yeah but this disease isn't very easy to spread and you're not contagious until you show symptoms. The high risk of death means people who show symptoms will be very likely to seek medical help quickly, unless they're a terrorist or something. I don't think it will be a big problem, yes, there might be a small outbreak that keeps the media excited for a while but it will not be anywhere near the African one.

I fucking love Ebola though.

9/30/2014 8:01:23 PM

Quote :

"I fucking love Ebola though."

Do what now?

9/30/2014 8:36:55 PM

I'm weird. I read a book about it as a kid and became fascinated. For a while I wanted to work in the cdc at biohazard level 4. Awful way to go.

9/30/2014 10:23:36 PM

I'm weird, too. I follow virology and have an affinity for Lassa.

Have you read "The Hot Zone" by Richard Preston? Fascinating and terrifying book about a near-miss with Ebola near DC. After reading it, this development scares me because of its ability to mutate quickly.

[Edited on October 1, 2014 at 12:31 AM. Reason : sss]

[Edited on October 1, 2014 at 12:33 AM. Reason : Grammar]

10/1/2014 12:29:46 AM

I'm not clear on how this meeting will be structured, or even what its goal is (all I've heard is "mapping"), but I hope to bring up taxis, yes.

slappy1 -- Neither ebola nor malaria are transmissible through the air, so masks wouldn't do anything there. Also, neither of them involve much in the way of coughing. Malaria and ebola share early symptoms like high fever, sweats, and body aches.

Kiwi -- I, too, "love ebola," in that it has interested me for a very long time. When I was in fourth grade, we had to do a little current events paragraph every week about an article from the newspaper. Since fourth grade for Grumpy coincided with a big outbreak in the DRC, every single week I picked an article about ebola. By fifth grade I was reading some seriously adult books about it that probably should have been kept out of my hands.

When you're in fourth grade, ebola is one of those horrible things that seems really neat, particularly to boys with a morbid streak. I mean, it makes blood shoot out of all your face holes (as I envisioned it). Since you're too young to really grasp death and suffering on any real scale, those things get ignored. It's like the Nazis. I used to think those were awesome, too -- neat uniforms, baller salute and march, fun tanks -- because I hadn't really gotten to the whole "genocide" part yet.

---

Now, as for ebola in the US, I get a certain perverse satisfaction out of this -- an "I-told-you-so" to my mom, who wanted me to quit and come home once this outbreak really started hitting the news there. But of course, Kiwi is right, it won't spread. The list of transmission routes is just too restrictive. If it were something like HIV that you could spread before you showed symptoms, it would be scary. But as it is, nobody with a 105 degree fever and crippling aches is going to be having much unprotected sex, and we have slightly better corpse-handling hygiene.

10/1/2014 4:14:48 AM

Quote :

"But as it is, nobody with a 105 degree fever and crippling aches is going to be having much unprotected sex, and we have slightly better corpse-handling hygiene."

You over-estimate Americans...

10/1/2014 12:39:44 PM

it's sexually transmittable for months after recovering

(but still not an issue in this country)

10/1/2014 12:48:15 PM

This is true, it does hang out in sperm. My guess is that the CDC doesn't just turn people loose after they get better and say, "Alright, have fun, bye bye." They keep a close eye on that shit.

---

At this point my commute home is giving me PTSD. A motorcycle traffic jam is horrifying. Worse than a car version, because cars can safely travel at slow speeds. Motorcycles can't remain upright at low speeds without a lot of swerving or feet-on-the-ground, both of which are dangerous when motos are packed tightly, which they always are. Night before last we hit a guy and then got rammed into the curb by another. I'd consider getting off and just walking from the point where it gets really bad, but there's one problem: I can't cross the street. No one can. There are no stop lights or natural breaks in traffic. During rush hour, the other side of the road might as well be the dark side of the moon.

---

The other day I was at a going away party for a volunteer, and there were two French girls there. One of them is an enigma. On the one hand, she looks kind of like Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother. Maybe (hopefully) it's just the haircut, because on the other hand, she's really hot. I'd rather not think about it.

Anyway, in the course of conversation it came up that in Europe, Belgians are stereotyped as being extremely thick. As in, stupid. This interested me. I like stereotypes and this was a new one. I asked what other ones they had.

Some were expected -- Germans are cold and efficient, Luxembourgers are rich, etc. Some were a little more odd. "Portuguese people are construction workers." Huh. OK. "Norwegians have unacceptably rigid rules regarding BYOB at parties." What the fuck? That's awfully specific for a stereotype, but the two girls were emphatic on this point. Apparently if you go to a party at a Norwegian's house, you bring your own drinks and consume them exclusively. There is no sharing or pooling of beverages.

---

The expat community limits itself to a fairly small area of Cotonou, so I see people I know a lot. Occasionally it is entertaining, like when the director of PC Benin waved to me as he came out of a Chinese "massage parlor." Or it's gross, like when the CDC's chief epidemiologist for the region has a swimsuit malfunction and you get a clear view of his expansive butt crack.

10/2/2014 3:49:09 AM

Quote :

"but there's one problem: I can't cross the street. No one can. There are no stop lights or natural breaks in traffic. During rush hour, the other side of the road might as well be the dark side of the moon."

In Vietnam, the solution to this problem is for people to just start walking across the street, with the convention being that traffic sheds around them. I can't imagine it works out well as often as it should, but it seems to work...

http://www.odditycentral.com/travel/the-art-of-crossing-the-street-in-vietnam.html

[Edited on October 2, 2014 at 3:58 AM. Reason : ]

10/2/2014 3:54:58 AM