I was 23 years old when, alighting from the dodgems in an English country fairground, I announced, ‘I want to learn to drive.’ Those brave individuals – including my husband and my brother – who volunteered to take me out to practise, were sorely tested. When asked how it had gone, my brother stated simply, ‘I didn’t know what fear was before this afternoon.’ This aside, I managed to pass my driving test first time, and to date have been the cause of only one accident with another vehicle. I have driven to a good number of other countries including twice from Budapest to England without any trouble at all. In fact, I enjoy driving.
However, I have to admit to having failed abysmally in trying to fathom the signs and regulations governing traffic in this country. Admittedly, I have no excuse, since the Hungarian equivalent of the Highway Code, KRESZ, is available on the internet; I am also not unaware that there is now a written exam in Britain which did not exist when I took my test. Yet the entire KRESZ document is comparable only to a legal contract: paragraphs and sub-sections, references back to previous (i) or (a) or (b) points, all swimming in a mass of dense text and convoluted sentence structures. Certainly not to be undertaken by the faint-hearted!
When my children were making their own intrepid attempts to commit these some five-hundred rules to memory (another sixty have just been added or modified), they also began to analyse and pass critical comment on my hitherto acceptable mode of conveying them about the city: ‘You don’t have to give way here – look, that street’s got the mackósajt sign!’ explained my son. This aforementioned mackósajt is the affectionate term for the upturned triangular Give Way sign familiar all over Europe, which indeed resembles the triangles of processed cheese (sajt) with the bear (mackó) on the label. What is not quite so well understood is that in order to determine that you have right of way, and that the drivers coming from your right have to stop, you are required to look along the road at rightangles to yours and try to spot the back of this sign! I have as yet not managed to achieve this at a speed which does not require me to slow down, especially in summer months when foliage may obscure the sign altogether – and I was taught to keep my eyes on the road (the one I am driving down!)
The truth is, that the most obvious difference when driving in Hungary – as in many areas of life – is that the regulations seem to provide more of a reference point than a series of unassailable rules; more of a general indicator of what the average driver is deviating from, than a rigid law. For example, probably around fifty percent of drivers do not wear seat belts, and most use their hand-held mobile phones as a matter of course. No sane pedestrian would expect a driver to stop for them – not even when that driver is a policeman – even allowing for any number of painted lines on the road or signs not obscured by greenery. So well trained is the average pedestrian, in fact, that when I recently stopped at a pedestrian crossing where the lights were out of order, and waved the man across, he steadfastly refused to move, angrily gesticulating at me to move on.
Thus, I continue to drive in the strange hybrid style born of a British training and a Hungarian penchant for jumping the lights – which must surely explain their time delay – and conclude that probably the best possible preparation for taking to Budapest’s roads would indeed be a few hours spent on the dodgems.
However, I have to admit to having failed abysmally in trying to fathom the signs and regulations governing traffic in this country. Admittedly, I have no excuse, since the Hungarian equivalent of the Highway Code, KRESZ, is available on the internet; I am also not unaware that there is now a written exam in Britain which did not exist when I took my test. Yet the entire KRESZ document is comparable only to a legal contract: paragraphs and sub-sections, references back to previous (i) or (a) or (b) points, all swimming in a mass of dense text and convoluted sentence structures. Certainly not to be undertaken by the faint-hearted!
When my children were making their own intrepid attempts to commit these some five-hundred rules to memory (another sixty have just been added or modified), they also began to analyse and pass critical comment on my hitherto acceptable mode of conveying them about the city: ‘You don’t have to give way here – look, that street’s got the mackósajt sign!’ explained my son. This aforementioned mackósajt is the affectionate term for the upturned triangular Give Way sign familiar all over Europe, which indeed resembles the triangles of processed cheese (sajt) with the bear (mackó) on the label. What is not quite so well understood is that in order to determine that you have right of way, and that the drivers coming from your right have to stop, you are required to look along the road at rightangles to yours and try to spot the back of this sign! I have as yet not managed to achieve this at a speed which does not require me to slow down, especially in summer months when foliage may obscure the sign altogether – and I was taught to keep my eyes on the road (the one I am driving down!)
The truth is, that the most obvious difference when driving in Hungary – as in many areas of life – is that the regulations seem to provide more of a reference point than a series of unassailable rules; more of a general indicator of what the average driver is deviating from, than a rigid law. For example, probably around fifty percent of drivers do not wear seat belts, and most use their hand-held mobile phones as a matter of course. No sane pedestrian would expect a driver to stop for them – not even when that driver is a policeman – even allowing for any number of painted lines on the road or signs not obscured by greenery. So well trained is the average pedestrian, in fact, that when I recently stopped at a pedestrian crossing where the lights were out of order, and waved the man across, he steadfastly refused to move, angrily gesticulating at me to move on.
Thus, I continue to drive in the strange hybrid style born of a British training and a Hungarian penchant for jumping the lights – which must surely explain their time delay – and conclude that probably the best possible preparation for taking to Budapest’s roads would indeed be a few hours spent on the dodgems.
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