Look Both Ways

It may seem like a very simple thing, or maybe it's going to make me seem like a very simple person, but somehow the mental energy I'm expending on knowing which way to look when I cross the street is embarrassing to admit. In my defence:

1. Parked cars here tend to face any direction, even on major streets--often in a seemingly random pattern of nose-to-nose-to-end, which takes away a significant clue as to where the traffic is going to come from!

2. Many streets have parked cars which make the street more narrow than the lanes of traffic travelling on them, and cars and buses often swerve way over to the opposite side of the street as oncoming traffic waits for them to pass. This makes it difficult to know whether a vehicle is just temporarily on a particular side of the street or if that's where it actually belongs.

But then there's the fact that many streets are marked right on the pavement with "LOOK LEFT" and "LOOK RIGHT," which you could argue means I have no excuse, OR you could argue that it means I'm not the only one with this problem (especially since such warnings are not restricted to tourist-only parts of London). And I didn't have this problem in Japan, even though they drive on the left too, so how do you explain that? Even Bob, whose sense of direction rarely goes astray, finds that cars unexpectedly come from the oddest of directions. The number of times we've been standing on a quiet corner and asked each other, "Which way are the cars going to come from?" and been unable to answer is very very silly.

Thank goodness for the flashing yellow globes you sometimes find on London streets:

Although drivers seem to relish any opportunity to demonstrate that they have the right of way over all pedestrians, somehow these globes on their striped poles (and their cousins, the illuminated low, rectangular boxes in the middles of some intersections--one of which you can see beside the left-hand globe) succeed in getting drivers to stop for pedestrians. This is very handy when the pedestrians happen to be us!