Traveling in most countries in Asia requires special skills as we learned in our three months of travel through six countries. One has to get used to doing things without any system or rules. If rules are there, they are not often followed.
This way of doing things is not entirely new to us as we grew up in India. However, having lived in the west for several decades we seem to have lost most of the skills to deal with chaos.
After a few days in India I started to handle the traffic, the crowds and general lack of any system. Ashok’s engineering mind prefers logic and rules but he had to relent. One learns to understand “Juggad” a somewhat newer term coined in India. It is defined as problem solving that uses limited resources in an innovative way.
After traveling in India, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, Japan was a shock to our system. They have established rules and code of conduct for everything. For example, for entering and exiting trains, buses or trams there are rules displayed. There are markings on the train platforms informing where the door of the numbered compartment will be, and arrows indicating which direction to form a queue for that compartment.
Entering a museum or any other buildings, ordering food or even using a toilet have their rules. Most public toilets had a map showing stalls inside on right and on left, in case you get lost. There are rules, posted everywhere, often in Japanese with pictographs.
The other curious thing is that everything in Japan works. No broken elevators, no stuck coin machines, no broken locks on public bathrooms. Every Toto toilet with it’s multiple options like hot and cold spray and warm seat worked, even in heavily traveled tourist areas.
The public places are very clean and one cannot find any garbage littering the streets. Surprisingly there are hardly any garbage cans in public places. We were told that the reason is that Japanese people don’t eat on the streets, only in establishments so they don’t need garbage cans!! I thought about this a bit and concluded that they must be carrying their trash back home.
The other interesting aspect is that people follow the rules all the time. I was amused that no one crosses the road not even on a small side street, without the GO light for pedestrians. Even if it is night and there are no cars anywhere in site, they wait for the signal to cross.
Crossing the road was the bane of our existence in these travels. In cities like Mumbai, Rajkot, Bangkok, Phnom Penh or Vientiane we had to take our lives in our hand to cross a road. Ashok will wait and wait and wait to find a space between rushing cars, motorbikes, tuk-tuks (rickshaws), and bicycles. I literally had to pull his hand to make him cross. This is not an exaggeration but in many cities the traffic is so bad that people hail a taxi or rickshaw to take them around to the other side of the road, as they are not able to walk across the traffic.
In Phnom Penh a local person taught us a trick to cross the road. You should not rush but go slow through the traffic once you enter. The vehicles will navigate around you as you keep on crossing several lanes of traffic. The vehicle speed is usually slow and the driver does not want to hit a person!!!
Thus we survived. Me pulling Ashok through traffic in most places we visited and then Ashok holding me back in Japan when I wanted to run across through the red light in an empty street!!
Meera, April 2019
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