Starting from Greece, except for around Sofia, there were not so many traffic jams. Then, Romania was really bad. After escaping Romania, driving becomes much easier, except for, maybe, some more traffic around Budapest and Wien. Well, now it is time to get to Germany. The highway network it is just amazing. It looks that there are several light-years that separates the country from Romania and Bulgaria. However, if Sunday, you get so many chances to catch a stau (the German name for traffic jam) due to road works that you may wonder if you did not get so unlucky that started to drive in the road work season.
If Easterner, you would get amazed how long before the road work they start to close one or several lanes, and how you may spend two hours or even more for a distance of 100 kilometers. Then, you will discover that sometimes, even if the lanes are closed, nobody seems to work, and would have been very easy to (re)open the road for the traffic. You will fast understand that free time is treasured here, and the workers seem to work many times like they did in 1980s communist Romania: they close today the lane, and start working three days after that, when the week-end is over.
You might then think, that from this point of view the incipient capitalism in the East, with very weak labor unions, and working during the weekends when necessary (but not always!), is much better than the well-established German society.
Or you may remember certain SciFi novels in which the new societies, which never experienced war, need the experience of the old generations and resuscitate some 20th century generals, to help them deal with the invaders. With other worlds, deprivation of good road connections seems to have taught the Easterners to faster repair their poor connection routes. The basic question remains if these quick maintenance works actually lead to a comparable quality…
Until answering this question, the image of the German never-ending road works makes Eastern people find the case in which their societies seem to better look.
Previous post in the series: Hungary!
The whole series (6 posts) is available here.
[Well, I dedicate this post to Dana's "aura", she knows what I mean ;)]
If Easterner, you would get amazed how long before the road work they start to close one or several lanes, and how you may spend two hours or even more for a distance of 100 kilometers. Then, you will discover that sometimes, even if the lanes are closed, nobody seems to work, and would have been very easy to (re)open the road for the traffic. You will fast understand that free time is treasured here, and the workers seem to work many times like they did in 1980s communist Romania: they close today the lane, and start working three days after that, when the week-end is over.
You might then think, that from this point of view the incipient capitalism in the East, with very weak labor unions, and working during the weekends when necessary (but not always!), is much better than the well-established German society.
Or you may remember certain SciFi novels in which the new societies, which never experienced war, need the experience of the old generations and resuscitate some 20th century generals, to help them deal with the invaders. With other worlds, deprivation of good road connections seems to have taught the Easterners to faster repair their poor connection routes. The basic question remains if these quick maintenance works actually lead to a comparable quality…
Until answering this question, the image of the German never-ending road works makes Eastern people find the case in which their societies seem to better look.
Previous post in the series: Hungary!
The whole series (6 posts) is available here.
[Well, I dedicate this post to Dana's "aura", she knows what I mean ;)]
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