Parking madness
What is it about parking in Portugal? Portuguese drivers seem to think they can double-park wherever they want, blocking other people in.
My apartment is in a backstreet of Loulé. On the ground floor is a popular café and several solicitors' offices. On my side of the street cars park along the kerb. On the far side, there is a parking bay for cars to park perpendicular to the street. All day long cars arrive to visit the café or one of the offices and, if no parking place immediately outside their intended destination is available, they simply double-park, blocking in two or three legitimately parked cars. Naturally, when the owner of one of the blocked cars wants to leave, they lean on their horn to attract the attention of the offending driver. This means that, sitting here in my office, I have to listen to the insistent blasting of car horns all day long. And frequently, when I want to go out, I find myself blocked in by one of these arrogant idiots.
Furthermore, often when I arrive home in the middle of the day and wish to park, I find an empty parking slot blocked by a double-parked car - yes! they are even too lazy to turn into a vacant spot, preferring to block it and two other cars! I've even seen an offending driver come out from the café to let someone out, then reverse back into his original position, thereby blocking the now-empty spot from being used by anyone else!
When the offenders do eventually emerge to move their car they rarely, if ever, show any sign of remorse or guilt, or even haste. On the occassions when I have challenged them for their arrogance and rudeness, they bristle with offence at my anger, claiming variously that they "were only five minutes" or "this is how it's done in Portugal".
Well, enough is enough! I'm going to start a one-man campaign against these rude, arrogant morons. If the police won't help (which I strongly doubt they will), I'm going to print up some multi-lingual notices and spend a day or two gluing them to the windshields of offending parkers.
Does any other country suffer from this kind of pig-headed, self-centred rudeness by drivers?
4 comments:
Wow! you want to fight the "system"? Don't loose your time, it's wrong but remember we are latins, we have our characteristics, on the other side we are very helpful to foreign people, something that people in some north Europe countries don't do, they're very arrogant in that aspect. Cheers, Luis Rosa from Faro.
You can always go away. Oh, by the way, i was watching your website to hire you, but after this post, i dont want you be working for any stupid arrogants portuguese. Best
Olá, espero que saiba ler português e não seja um daqueles estrangeiros arrogantes que vivem no algarve e continuam a falar a língua de origem. é muito simples quando não gostamos de um sitio, vamo-nos embora, por isso..
Eu leio Português... :-)
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