Real Life Frogger

It looks like all those hours spent playing Frogger and using profanity accordingly have paid off. Why?

Because crossing a street in Albania is a real-life image of what is portrayed virtually in Frogger.

The main traffic circle around Skanderbeg Square in Tirana is sure to give you an adrenaline rush. Walking down the street on Thanksgiving Day in Tirana, I was astounded at the gridlock. And you thought the Surekill Expressway was a parking lot? People who live in Tirana routinely leave an hour early for work to compensate for the flow of traffic.

And the traffic insanity isn’t just limited to the capital city.

During the summer in my village, the Autostrada that is normally 2 lanes (one going in each direction) turns into 3, 4, 5 and even 6 lanes of traffic. It’s terrifying; you can sit and count the near collisions while waiting for the bus. One time we counted 6 near-accidents in forty minutes. The thing is that most Albanian drivers, although I’ve seen them do almost physics-defying maneuvers, are incredibly capable and well-adjusted to this system that, to the outsider, appears to be based solely on chaos. While the statistics about accidents in Albania aren’t great, I can say through my observations that they could be a whole lot worse.

Yes, we have traffic laws here. But does anyone follow them? No. Even if the green light for pedestrians is lit, you have to triple check before stepping onto the street. Red lights for cars? Well, they are basically just suggestions just like the rest of the signals.

Alex Ovechkin once said the difference between driving at home in Russia and in the US is that you can’t bribe a cop in America. Let’s just say Ovechkin’s observation isn’t limited to only Russia.

The best part is the popularity of horn-honking, a mentality that I never quite understood. Imagine you are sitting in your car with no sign of movement at all from the cars in front of you, and your way of confronting this scenario is to not only honk, but hold your horn. Perhaps in all the history of mankind a horn honk has never remedied this scenario. But that doesn’t stop people from trying. My friend Tnaya once suggested the following: that in each car, there is a mechanism that causes the car to self-destruct if the horn is honked. The kicker is that you don’t know when it will be. Maybe it will be a million honks, maybe it will be two honks. All you know is that after a certain number of honks, the next time you beep will cause your car to explode. She reasoned that it would cause people to think long and hard as to whether a single honk on their horn was as important as their life. Tirana would turn into the library of a retirement community if we lived in world where this would ever be legal.