Those Stupid American Tourists

The hilarious Dave Barry, on vacation in London:

"We are now in our second week of walking around in countries where people drive on the left, so you'd think that by now we'd know how to cross a street. But you would be wrong. At every intersection, it's the same thing: We look nervously in every possible direction for several minutes, and still we're not 100 percent sure which cars we need to be worried about. The locals handle it effortlessly, walking past us and setting off across the street with barely a glance, but we stand rooted to the sidewalk like unusally stupid trees. When we finally decide it's safe, we take a hesitant step forward and YIKES HERE COMES A CAR and we have to scurry back to the sidewalk. At one point we were directly across the street from our hotel -- it was right there, beckoning to us -- and we thought we'd never reach it. We considered looking for a hotel located on our side of the street and checking in there."