It's my birthday again!  Well, maybe not yet where I am right now, but it's July 17th in the Netherlands already, so it kinda is my birthday.
 I usually spend my birthday with familh and -very important- a lot of cake and ice cream. Not this year though. This year I'm spending my birthday with some leftover fear from yesterday's ride in a Peruvian cab.

Visiting Peru is a dream come true. If it wasn't for the crazy traffic. I'm currently in the huge city of Lima, where the amount of cars has more than doubled in the past two years. To make it even more exciting, the Peruvians thought it a good idea to give cars the right of way over everything and anything. I'm visiting the  city as a pedestrian and I almost got killed a dozen times  the 30 hours since I got here...

At some point my dad wanted to get a cab. We did. And then the madness began. Blinkers aren't used here -if you're lucky a driver will wave with his hand out of the window. This doesn't happen very often because most of the time your vehicle is sandwiched between trucks. Right of way is something everyone wants but no one gets. The noise is deafening because everyone is angrily honking away at cars who are too busy honking to get moving.
In these trying circumstances I sat on the backseat of a cab that belonged to a driver who had quite possibly lost his mind. Half of the time he drove in  two lanes at ones. If so much as an inch of space between two cars opened up, he was already cramming his car into it. I was smashed from the right to the left and back every time we turned a corner. I was glad it was almost over, prayed for a break and thought I was going to get one when I saw a stop sign.
The cab driver ignored it and shot forward onto a gigantic crosaroads with five lanes of cars coming at us from the right. None of them stopped for us. Luckily the cab driver hit the brakes at the very last second. We somehow made it across the crossroads and to our destination. With one final gravity defying turn we pulled up in front of the restaurant that was our destination.  I fled the car with shaking hands and unstable knees...
The moral of the story? Never EVER get into a Peruvian cab! Never!