"Recalculating..."

Thought I should talk a little about the street signage and the driving practices here. It's not important but it's f'in ridiculous.

The signs for the streets are listed in French and Spanish but typically the actual street name is only found on the side of a building. What is shown in a more visible manner are signs telling you what towns or well-known loactions that street will lead to. So when you enter an intersection and/or roundabout my GPS is saying what road to take, in it's very monotone English voice but the actual road name is not displayed largely anywhere in the intersection. In the picture below, the actual street name is that small white sign, on the building,just to the left of the red traffic light...that doesn't help much. Instead these larger white signs give more of a general direction for all these different locations within Toulouse that I can head to. It's actually not too bad of an idea, if the street name was included on a larger sign.



Because of this we have seemed to have missed a lot of turns while we've been here. Our imitation of our GPS is it saying "recalculating". She seems just as frustrated doing all the recalculations as us. I half expect her to someday say "make a right, wait, not that one but... wait, ah, where's the street name!...this sucks!!!... recalculating"

Then the highway driving habits observed on our journey home from Provence seemed as though some emergency was occuring...like a medival fortress was on fire or the Capitole of Toulouse was under attack. Lot of bobbing an weaving, jockeying for very limited space. I've resisted using any universal hand gestures. Instead I mumble old English slang, still heard to this day I'm sure, when heading down the Kennedy into the great city of Chicago.