The Spanish are great people- friendly, welcoming, trusting, decent, and despite the rumours, hard-working. They also cannot drive.
Rather than view the white line as a separator between lanes, they seem to see it as something to try and keep to the middle of, like the power line on a Scalextric track.
Entry slip-roads should be used in their entirety- if the opportunity to pull onto the motorway presents itself with a hundred yards of slip-road to spare, this should be avoided in favour of carrying on to the very end of the slip, even if this then means having to come to a dead stop because there is now traffic on the motorway.
They will brake at corners- EVERY corner, no matter how broad-sweeping and no matter how slow they are already going on the approach. It's as if they were taught to slow down for corners without any real explanation as to why, so they do so unwaveringly. I had some joker right up my a*se yesterday for a good mile on a straight road; two corners later I've regained half a mile on him. I don't think accelerating through a corner is even on the radar.
Then we have roundabouts. I was told very early on that the Spanish don't know how to use roundabouts, and it absolutely true. The outside lane does for everything, the inside lane is purely decorative. The transport authority had to issue guidance lately to explain how to use roundabouts- and even then buckled to convention rather than try and re-educate a nation of drivers.
Roundabouts also make great parking spots should you need to stop and make a phone call.
A couple of days ago we saw a line of cars pulling into the outside lane of the motorway, as if to overtake some invisible vehicle. The reason for which, it turned out as we got closer, was that there was a traffic cone- on the hard shoulder.
At first this bizarre avoidance of a non-existent obstacle seemed to do nothing but reaffirm our opinions of Spanish driving- then it occurred to us; in a country where you can drive for miles without seeing another car, where three cars in front of you constitutes a traffic jam, where any road works are started and completed within a day at most, and where the roads are laid properly in the first place so don't require constant patching-up, most Spanish drivers have probably never seen a traffic cone- so seeing one on the hard shoulder was probably as strange and unnerving to them as seeing a pig dressed as a clown pushing a wheelbarrow.
