But crossing the street this morning provided some key context.
Start on "my" side, directly across from the main entrance to the school. You can't really stand on the sidewalk because it's full of stackable/folding tables and chairs for the triple-decker breakfast stand. One cart fries chicken and pig, slices it and packs it on rice. Another cart does intestine and betle leaf soup (slow-cooked chicken stock with pig internals and a handful of betel leaves; this is one of my favorite things) or jok (rice porridge) with ginger, scallion, garlic, piggy shallot cracklins, and parsley. The third does kick-your-teeth sweet coffee or tea. And they do both sit down and takeout, so instead of a narrow strip of walkway, the gutter is clogged with either standing students or idling bikes waiting for a bag of breakfast. So there's no comfortable place to either sit or stand without being in the way of someone trying to get through exactly where you are, farang. Just get out of the way as soon as you can, okay?
Well, the nearest lane (which technically goes right to left, remember) holds bikes parked two rows deep, so to walk past, you have to be pushing one shoulder into the second official lane of traffic. But you can't just turn and walk with the flow, because there's the bike traffic: someone on a scooter is almost guaranteed to be driving the wrong way to either park or merge.
Just past the scooter parking lane, straddling the dashed line dividing the two near-side lanes is the songtau lane. It's not quite a through-going lane because any given songtau is prone to stop at any given time for no reason whatsoever. For a goodly while, it was like playing "spot the deer" in the car with Dad--how quickly after screeching, jerking, or slamming to a halt could I spot the foot-going potential john? But I've come to realize, if not necessarily accept, that they stop for nothing more than the driver's whim--a promising shadow, a group of cronies parked and hoping for a load, a group of cronies parked and lounging, an enticing patch of shade, crosstraffic, the lack thereof, any sort of tremor in the force.
Generally, I find that it's a safe place to walk provided I want to flag down a songtau, but if I'm trying to hoof from here thence, it's like standing in a gutter during kindergarten bowling. Except a songtau, whether moving in a brisk reverse, creeping unmindfully forward, or racing at breakneck, hurts a helluva lot more than even a well-thrown three-pound bowling ball.
But the songtaus aren't alone, by any means.
Scooters, as much as they can be said to adhere to lanes, stick to fringe areas. For the sake of argument, assume you're driving a scooter south: your options, on this road, are 1) far left along the parked bikes if you're moving slowly and trying to park or merge; 2) a half-length from the parked bikes if you're in the slower lane, but watch out for merging songtaus or songtaus flying past or against traffic; 3) toward the middle line, if you're intent on getting there more quickly, but watch out for merging and passing traffic from either direction, especially traffic 4) screaming through a brief gap in the oncoming traffic; 5) in the far right, going against the main stream of traffic, just behind the scooter parking zone. So pretty much anywhere but down the middle of the opposing lane, unless there's a really big hole, say, made by a U turn. But a recap is in order, before joining that stream:
You're on the E curb of a N-S road, crossing directly W to the main entrance of a school. You've just been handed an open-topped two-handle baggie full of coffee syrup, a styrofoam clamshell with deep-fried pig belly, and change, so you're juggling the money, pig, coffee, and wallet at the same time. There's no standing where you're standing because there are two opposing streams of people after their coffee/tea syrup and deep fried wakeup, there's no standing on the sidewalk because it's become what in Europe would be called a bistro, there's no standing just off the sidewalk because it's a busy scooter parking/staging area, and there's not enough room to squeeze even my skinny butt between the back of the scooters and active traffic, which thus far consists of half a lane of scooter traffic, and a lane-plus for songtaus. But it's a two-lane road, so there are two lanes of southbound cars squeezed between the parked mopeds and the area within a quick swerve of being back in the southbound lane.
And the northbound traffic is an exact mirror: bike traffic just past the parked bikes, then two lanes of northbound traffic beginning halfway into the center southbound lane, followed by the songtau/bike lane, two lanes of parking traffic, bikes parked two-deep, and a solid press of people trying to get from the road to the sidewalk or back while singlemindedly charging through the crowd.
Don't forget the school busses--decommissioned Cold War troop-moveres--that roar through with lane-and-a-half widths that give way to no other vehicles, that stop almost as randomly as songtaus, minivan school busses that run the local routes, parents dropping off kidlets, and police standing in the middle of the road tweeting whistles.
It WAS Mario Kart. Now it's Frogger.
What's terrifying is that the safest place to stand while crossing is on the center line--usually, anyone driving down the middle has their eyes open, and nobody wants to hit a farang in front of a school.
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