I saw a car/motorcycle accident today. Firstly, and this may not really be all that relevant, but although there are ‘lanes’ and ‘traffic lights’ here, they are more like a friendly suggestion. Just like the seatbelt law. All the drivers know exactly where the police hang out, looking for seatbelt offenders, and all the drivers put on the seatbelts only when they pass the police. It’s an odd symbiosis. I think after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians, don’t want to follow the word of the government, so their rebellion is to not wear their seatbelts. I am not kidding about this. Several Russians have told me that seatbelt offences are society’s way of rebelling against the already dead Soviet Union. You go Russians! Anyway, back to the accident. The motorcycle was in the rightest ‘lane’ and a taxi was coming from the other direction and made a left and hit the motorcycle head on. The motorcyclist flew about 20 feet across the hood of the taxi and landed in the street. The front end of the taxi was destroyed, the motorcycle was left in pieces. It was especially terrific (I once used the word ‘terrific’ in an essay to describe Tito’s reign. I wanted to say that he elicited terror. My teacher read the essay, and when I got it back, the word was underlined with a question mark. So, again, now I wanted to use the word ‘terrific’ to mean illicit terror, and I decided to have some backing up from a dictionary. An in fact it is in there, ok, perhaps it says that it is archaic, but really what does that mean? Ye olde folk twig thine.) to hear the accident. There was no desperate braking sound, just a crash and burn sound.
Anyway, after the accident, no one really seemed to notice that there was a man lying in the middle of the street. Traffic moved along as usual. Narrowly driving around the injured man. A few minutes later an ambulance came, it just happened to be driving along the street…because usually ambulances take about 30 mins…and to my horror, they just moved the man, without immobilizing his neck or anything. I guess for the record, the man seemed to be ok. A.k.a. there wasn’t a huge puddle of blood on the concrete and a cracked skull, and limbs several feet away from the rest of his body. The man even sat himself up into the ambulance. I mean, hello, Spinal Cord injuries. Hello! Internal bleeding! I have nothing more to say about this.
