Potholes

Now that the weather is in the freeze/thaw cycle, driving here has taken on somewhat of a video game feel. As you drive along, you must be on the constant lookout for potholes, and making important decisions about which maneuver to try: The Swerve, the Straddle, or the Slam on the brakes? Usually following the car in front of you is a good choice, just in case you didn’t see the pothole they’re swerving around, but since our van is so much bigger than other cars, I can sometimes successfully Straddle what they cannot (and if I tried to Swerve in the same spot as they did, I may not have enough room, depending on the width of the road or the width between potholes). Then again, it depends on how many potholes there are in a given spot and just how deep they are. And of course, you must also check to see if there is a car coming (in which case you cannot avoid your pothole by driving on their side of the road. Then, of course, you simply Slam on the brakes and drive Slowly. :) It’s amazing to see new potholes developing all the time. I thought there were a lot of potholes when we arrived here, but...I was wrong. Maybe because we have a big police center on our street, though, they actually fixed about 2/3 of them so that you only get a smaller bump up instead of down along a good portion of our street--I haven’t seen other roads like that, though...just ours. Other potholes have dirt, rocks, and sometimes even garbage thrown in to fill them. On the bright side, people don’t speed as much here in Tashkent as they do in America!