"Hey I'm walking here!"

If you have ever been to a big city in America you know how crazy drivers can get, but they have nothing on the Florentines. Now that we have been here in Florence for a while we had seen and experienced our share of Italian driving and I have to say it was a bit scary. Now this is not to say that Italian drivers are crazy or scary, just that they way Florence is set up makes it a challenging job. Not only for the drivers, but for pedestrians too!

Let me set the scene: the roads are just big enough for a bus to get through and mainly go only one way, the sidewalks are a tiny strips of concrete, and the amount of pedestrians generally outnumber how many should be on these tiny strips of sidewalk. If you can image this, you can picture Florence.

Now if you are picturing these tiny streets you can only imaging what it is like to navigate through them. Well let me explain it to you. With the sidewalks being narrow pieces of land and with the amount of people on the sidewalks making it hard for everyone to fit, this means that people are walking on the streets. Now this is a dangerous situation in any city, but especially in Florence. With the one way streets, barely big enough for the buses, walking in the street leads to a high probability of getting honked (hence my clever, movie quoted title). Now as a pedestrian I think that we obviously own the road and naturally everyone should yield to us walkers; however, after riding in a cab through these lovely streets I think that all the pedestrians should be moving themselves off the streets, they clearly belong to the drivers. Now as you can tell neither one of these thoughts can be correct since they so obviously contradict themselves, so how does one navigate the streets of Florence?

What a loaded question that is, not one I can easily answer either. Since being here I have notice that the Italians seem to be very patience people, which is great because as someone from another country I am generally too busy looking at the beautiful city of Florence to realize that I am in the street. I tend to get told from our fellow bloggers here, that there is a car coming. This means that I am that annoying person in the street that the drivers have to wait on to move--the person I hate when I am the one riding in a car; however, out of all the times I have been caught in the street I have yet to be honked at, proving the amazing patience of the Florentines. So it seems that the drivers know that at times pedestrians have to be on the streets and the pedestrians have to realize that they need to do the best they can to stay out of the way of cars. Like most situations a compromise yields the best results.

So what does this all mean? Well it really just means that I am not accustom to pedestrians and cars being so close to one and other and to me this is crazy and a little scary at times. However, like all the other cultural barriers this is just one more thing that we have learned from and adapted to. Living in cultures outside your own will always be different and it is the adaptability of a person that can make or break the experience.