Roundabouts

One of the things that I have been worried about, in some cases rightly, on this trip is getting from one place to another.  Of particular concern is the fact that, here in the UK, they drive on the other side of the road from what I am accustomed.  While in Scotland, I was a passenger trying to pay attention and get a feel for how it is to have the steering wheel on the right and drive on the left hand side of the road.  Now that we have made the trip across the middle of Ireland, with me driving, I have a few observations.
First, the biggest problem with such a shift is not really anything that major, it is just a sort of discomfort.  A moment of panic when you make a turn, trying to overcome a conditioned response to slide into the right lane.  The basic issue of having right turns be like left turns in the US and vice versa.  The sort of odd feeling on big roads that you should be keeping right and passing left instead of elsewhere, and also the fact that I generally sight the line from the opposite side of the car, so my eyes kind of drift the wrong way and the car tends to as well.  On the M6 today, I kept getting that buzzy warning from the rumble strips down the edge line of the road, and on the smaller roads I was making Michele really nervous that I was going to send us into the ditch.
And of course, there are the roundabouts, the way that the UK handles many of it's intersections.  After nearly a week of riding shotgun with our friends from Scotland, I was still a little unsure about how to manage roundabouts.  I had gotten a pretty good feel for the entrance to roundabouts, but I was still a little fuzzy on where to get out.  Especially in busy traffic, especially, as was the case coming into Galway today that the GPS (or SAT-NAV as they call it here) was just slightly less than truly descriptive of what I was about to need to do.
It's such small stuff, but it amounts to a fairly significant increase in the stress level of getting from one place to another.  Driving has become so automatic for me after almost 25 years that this feels sort of like trying to write left handed.
Travel does this to you, it shifts you out of your comfortable habits and puts you on your heels.  This is actually it's most valuable benefit.  As a general rule, people who travel a great deal have broader perspectives on the world.  Even if it's only for a little while, they get to know what it's like to be a stranger and an alien in  a foreign land.
The bible tries to teach us this lesson, but sometimes we need reinforcement.  Deuteronomy 10: 19: "You are to love those who are foreigners, because you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt." (NIV)  In our treatment of people from other lands and other cultures it seems the quality of mercy is not strained.  It is helpful to be in a place where your accent is the odd one.  Where you are the one who doesn't really belong.  Then, at least, you know what it feels like to have everything switched around on you.