These are two jokes I imagine Jerry Seinfeld making about traffic in Kathmandu following a visit to the city. (Making jokes and laughing about the wayward traffic in our city is but one way to deal and cope with it!)
Joke #1. This is a slightly modified version of the one I posted on my Facebook wall on January 12, 2014.
Yes, that’s exactly what it looks like: bikers (the ones on the right) going down the wrong side of the road (this is a two-way street) AND waiting to get past because the traffic on their side of the road, including my car from where I took this shot, is not moving!!! Notice how the biker coming from the other direction is struggling to squeeze through! While waiting patiently in a traffic jam another time on this same street, I once asked one of those bikers, “Why are you driving down the wrong side when you can see we have a traffic jam?” His response: “Everyone else is doing it!”
“You know…for a country that moves so slowly, everyone plying the streets of Kathmandu is in a hurry.
“The bikers are in a hurry…every opening they see, every little opening they get, they’ll drive their wheels into, doesn’t matter if that means blocking the rest of the traffic or going up or down the wrong side of the road.
“The cars, the buses, the cyclists…you name it…they are all also always in a hurry!
“All of them show next to no patience while flying around the streets of Kathmandu…like getting where they were going was an emergency!
“And yet…Kathmanduites are always late to practically everything!”
Joke #2. This was also posted on Facebook the same day.
A “No Honking” public service notice next to a hospital in Kathmandu. I have seen no-honking signs all over the world but this is the first of its kind. The top line of text after the no-honking symbol says what one would expect: “No Honking -Bir Hospital.” The text to the right of the image is what is interesting. Loosely translated it says,’Let’s not honk unnecessarily. Let’s be civil.”
Here’s another joke Jerry Seinfeld would crack after a visit to Kathmandu.
(You have to imagine him standing in front of an audience doing his monologue as he would at the beginning of a Seinfeld episode.)
“I just got back from a short trip to Kathmandu…and what a trip it was!
“Have any of you been in a traffic jam?”
“Yeah, I can see all your heads nodding. We all have been.
“Did you know that you have at your disposal, in your own vehicle no less, something that can get the traffic moving when you find yourself in a jam?
“Yup, no kidding, we all do.
“And, for me, it took a trip to Kathmandu to discover this. Yup, I am not making this up.
“That thing ladies and gentlemen, that traffic unjammer is none other than your horn!!
“All you have to do to get the traffic rolling when you find yourself in a jam is to just press that horn and just let it rip, like there’s no tomorrow.
Chaos theory- comfort in noise and disorder !! Everyone smashes on their horns continually and continuously, which orchestrates something of an orchestra ! In Nepal, if you don’t hear a horn, the only explanation is that the entire has been blown up by a nuclear bomb!!
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Chaos theory- comfort in noise and disorder !! Everyone smashes on their horns continually and continuously, which orchestrates something of an orchestra ! In Nepal, if you don’t hear a horn, the only explanation is that the entire has been blown up by a nuclear bomb!!