Saturday, November 22, 2008

Driving in the Czech Republic

URGGHHHHHHH where do I start???????
I will start with a scary statistic from the first 10 days of August but remember that August is summer and there is no ice on the roads. In the first 10 days of August 31 people died on Czech roads, which is a pretty terrifying statistic. It is a well known fact over here that Czech Republic has one of the worst driving records for fatalities every year of all European countries per capita.
From my personal experiences I have decided that most Czech people drive on the roads the same way that I drive on an Xbox……………..flat out with not a care in world. Unfortunately on the Xbox when you hit the road barrier at 300km/h you hit the ‘start’ button, scroll down to restart and begin again.

Just the other month Michaela and I were driving to her parents place about 90km from Prague and we had some idiot cross onto our side of the road in order to overtake someone. We were at the time in an overtaking lane and had almost passed a large truck so there was nowhere for us to go. The other driver realized at the last moment that there was in fact someone on the road in front of him and made a corrective move. There must have been centimeters in it. After I finished emptying my arse contents into my undies I got really angry and wanted to do a U-turn, chase the dirty MOFO and hit him with a tyre iron but I quickly realized that the massive horsepower of the 1.3L Opel Agila may not be up to the task of chasing down the large BMW.

I guess the scariest thing about the driving over here is that we are driving around in a car which has the structural integrity of an empty coke can, and that may in fact be a little harsh on the coke can.

The speed limit on the freeways is 130km/h but the almost ZERO visible police on those roads allows plenty of people to sit on 160+km/h without fear of recriminations. Once again I am restricted here by MASSIVE horsepower of the 1.3L engine – hahahahaha. On top of this the freeways in this country are very good and such speeds are easily doable if your car can take it.

Oh one other strange thing (well perhaps just different to Australia) is that if you have a crash over here you cannot move the car (even an inch) until the cops arrive so they can do a report for the insurance companies. This causes massive holdups on main roads even when someone only lightly bumps someone else in the rear. I understand the reasoning is to stop fraud but when there is already corruption in the police aren’t you just replacing apples with apples. HAHAHAHA I love it.

Oh one other thing, despite the horn on the tram sounding like a really friendly “hi” it actually means “GET THE PHUQ OUT OF THE WAY”. Stay out of the way of the trams because in battle of tram vs car the tram always wins
Until next time this is Gatesy signing off and preparing to drive to cricket training in a BLIZZARD

2 comments:

paddleperil said...

Hmmm, think I'd rather drive in India!

Love the 4wd sandwich

Daft Wullie said...

I think the old 'armoured' car style of eastern europe might not have been such a bad idea.