Yield in the name of love

A funny thing about driving in Alice:

There are only a handful of stop signs in the whole town. Seriously, I have only actually had to stop at maybe 2 intersections in the past 6 weeks of driving around. Instead, most intersections have yield signs, only they don't say yield. Yes, they have the familiar triangular shape and lively red outline, but instead the say "Give Way." I suppose this is still perfectly descriptive of what you should do, but it is not the only time I have thought that Australians tend to use more words than necessary to communicate a point. Darned if I can think of another example right now, but you will have to trust me on this. Australia can be verbose.

A side-effect of this culture of Giving Way is that you actually have to pay attention at all intersections. Like, to the max. Rolling through an intersection is perfectly acceptable because all of the intersections have bloody yield signs! I've narrowly avoided being broad-sided a couple of times now.

Even though I've been here for a while, I still get confused a little bit about the direction of traffic, especially at intersections and when crossing the road on foot. First of all, it is hard to wrap your head around right and left turns being opposite from the States. (Left turns are the tight ones and right turns are the wide ones.) Secondly, when crossing the street, I have a really hard time figuring out which direction to look for traffic. Back home, you look left to see the traffic in the lane closest to you, and then look right to see traffic coming from the other direction. Not so Down Under. More than once I have stepped into the road convinced that there was no traffic, only to here some vehicle or another approaching from behind me. Very disconcerting. But it's all part of the experience, eh?