Traffic

We've been asked by a few people here what are our most liked and least liked things about France. One of my negative things is the shopping carts. Here (and in Italy, and probably everywhere in Europe) all four wheels turn. Thus moving your carts around the store is quite difficult and tiring. It also doesn't make any sense (to me). And the French folks we've talked to have agreed that it's ridiculous and they hate it. How hard is it to lock the back two wheels?

File under #firstworldproblems

One of my favorite things is the use of roundabouts. I've mentioned it before, but in most (not all) non-highway situations, roundabouts are WAY more efficient in moving traffic through an intersection than traffic lights. Here's a youtube video that simulates a number of traffic flow solutions and gives an average throughput by type. Very interesting. On a typical four lane road, a large roundabout beats a regular traffic light by 44.7%

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yITr127KZtQ

Cost savings vs traffic light systems are also significant. My thorough research on the cost to install (read: I googled it for 30 seconds) indicates that one intersection costs about $250,000-$300,000 from start to finish and then about $8,000 per year in electricity and maintenance. A roundabout has none of this.

Roundabouts aren't perfect though. Once traffic density reaches a certain point, it feels (can't prove it) like throughput decreases because the intersection is obstructed more often.

Baobabs

On our first visit to Senegal, we heard stories about baobabs and how linked they are to the spirit world. A common belief is that each baobab hosts one spirit, which can either be benevolent or malevolent. Baobabs that host particularly malevolent spirits are completely left alone, resulting in the beautiful spreading nature of the tree in the following picture.

Some day I'll take a pic with me underneath so you can understand how massive it is.

Other baobabs are pruned for grazing animals at the end of the dry season, since everything else is gone at that point and baobabs somehow know to push out new growth in anticipation of the rainy season. They look more like this:

An interesting look in its own right...

During sunrise and sunset, so I was told, the spirits are particularly active, and nobody goes near the trees. Children are especially at risk. But from 9am to noon you can send your 14 year old to prune branches with not a care in the world!

I would start crying after the first 10 feet.

When a spirit decides to leave a baobab, I was told, the tree collapses. Often, there is no visible signal that collapse is about to occur, and then in the span of a few weeks, branches fall and the trunk splits. And since baobabs are technically soft-tissue plants (not trees) they don't have a whole lot of strength. It makes me curious if a collapse has ever been captured on video. Collapse is rare (baobabs live many hundreds of years), so it's an event worthy of interest in the surrounding community. For many, it means the spirit decided to leave, and that raises the dual questions of 1. Where did it go? and 2. What did the farmer do whose land the baobab was on?

Our teammates Jo and Ma bought some land near Beer Sheba recently, and on that land was a large baobab. Each evening after they finished work on their plot, Jo and Ma would sit under the baobab and pray for their land. But a few months ago, they noticed that branches were falling off the tree. A few weeks later they came out to the land and saw that it had completely collapsed.

There's still a little bit of shade.

An interesting event that carries a lot of significance in the surrounding villages.

(A)

p.s. Baobabs are really neat trees, I'll probably do more posts about rope-making, fruit, growth habits, the hollow interiors, etc.

Visit

We took a little trip over our winter break to visit my brother and his family in the middle east. It was interesting for me to look at the plants growing in and around the city.  Especially the wild stuff.  Plant nerd stuff follows:

A huge, healthy Moringa oleifera tree behind the bathrooms at a local museum. I have never seen one this big, so I have no idea how old it is.

My assumption is that the roots have found their way into the waste stream of the bathrooms, because most other M. oleifera in the area are not simultaneously putting out dark green leaves, flowers and seed pods all at once.

There were some exceptionally long pods on the tree.

Huge numbers of flowers.

There were a bunch of shining sunbirds (Cinnyris habessinicus) drinking nectar out of the flowers.

Thorn mimosa (Vacellia nilotica) at the same museum.  Incredibly thorny, nitrogen fixer. One of a few trees that produce gum arabic.

Lignum-vitae (Guaiacum officinale). Ornamental that is planted all over the city.  Interesting fact, the wood is denser than water and will sink.

Mmm, plants.

Side note, apparently in northwest France, spring begins in late January.  Daffodils and crocuses are coming up and bushes are pushing out new leaves. Spring in this part of France is as long as summer in Nashville. Brassicas do incredibly well.

(A)