Crowded Rambling

There really are too many people on the planet! I can recall school teacher of mine way back in the mists of time at Macleod High school suggesting that if mice could speak they would all agree that there was a people plague. I am tending to see what he meant.

Compared with the Wide Open Spaces of Sunny Ausralia, places here are cramped. People everywhere. Crammed in together. Despite this population density, however, individuals seem to cope. They make allowances for each other that simply would not happen in Australia. Of you find yourself in the wrong lane coming into a tollway paying place, you just whack on the indicators and move across lanes. No need for eye contact, just do it. Voilà! Done. Fish out your coins, chuck them into the basket, up goes the barrier and you are off again at 132 kph! Utmost cooperation and everyone's a winner. I'm Australia, I tend to think that there would be a great deal of tooting, glaring and fist shaking.

This is sounding like a drving blog, bit really it isn't. It's more about how people adapt to living in close proximity to each other as the population grows into the finite space provided by Mother Earth. You can see it most obvously in places like Shanghai and Hong Kong, but also in market towns such as Aix. It affords a great deal of optimism for countries like Australia that are only in the early throes of population explosion.

This soap box is getting rickety. Too many people vying for travel news and anecdotes. I'll bugger off and let you get on with it.

YBP,

GCR