‘Rappel 50′
or
‘Driving French’
I know, the display of the speedo in my car is somewhat behind the real speed, but not more than 10%. Consequently, I’m driving 55 km/h inner city, maybe 58 km/h, which would correspond to real 53 km/h then. I’m already used to the fact that people normally complain that I’m driving too slow. Quite often I’m wondering: Am I really the only one in this whole wide world sticking to speed limits? In France for sure! This is what I realized from the beginning, since I’m living here. Empty street – just a few seconds later, there is a car behind you, almost hitting your boot. Where did it come from? At what speed was it driving that I didn’t see it earlier? Another one. The next. They are queueing behind my car. Especially inside towns. Each time, it takes only few seconds until there is the first one behind me. Probably they think ‘Why is this stupid German not driving faster?’ Am I really the only one in France sticking to speed limits? It seems. At least, there are everywhere reminder signs: ‘Rappel 50′. I was wondering quite some time what these signs could mean. They are everywhere just few hundred meters behind the town sign. Checking a French dictionary, I learned that these signs are supposed to remind the people of the speed limit in towns. Taking into account that these signs are really everywhere, it’s obvious that French tend to drive too fast, isn’t it?
Another pecularity are duct covers. It seems that they are at distances of only few meters in French towns. And of course they are not mounted evenly in the street. No. Consequently, one has two possibilities: either one drives zig-zag (what by the way many French do) or one is hopping along the street like a cangaroo. This of course has also the reason that the streets themselves are not even either. In addition, there are hundreds of these bumps across the streets. They are supposed to slow down the French, but of course this helps only for the short way of the bump itself – inbetween French don’t care about speed limits. Probably this is also the reason why most of these bumps are very high and very steep. Don’t French guys have lowered cars? Well, if they had, they would really have a hard time to get along here. Probably each trip would last twice as long, as they couldn’t take about 80% of the streets because of the bumps.
Having a french car behind you, is especially annoying when you are driving at night. As they drive as close as possible behind you, the inside of your car is so bright from the light of the car behind you that reading a newspaper would be no problem at all. This is really annoying, when you want to see the street in front of you, and gets even worse, when it’s raining, especially when you don’t know the street well. Anyhow the shape of the streets in combination with rain is another challenge. I would not recommend anybody to walk along a French street when it is raining. Thanks to the up and downs and bumps and holes in the streets, there are flows and small ponds of water everywhere. Just perfect for a passing car to produce gigantic fountains. Even when driving on the road, your car might be overflooded by a fountain of water, when another car passes you on the other side of the street during heavy rain. In this case, you are lucky, if your wiper is already at fullspeed, else you don’t see anything for a few seconds, which is not the best thing, especially having French drivers around…
