driving....

This is the route I take with Aude to her ice skating practice every Tuesday night.

It is 1.9 km (1.1 miles)

This is the route I take to get home, with the help of a French GPS.

It is 2.7 km (1.6 miles)

Here is a video for your viewing pleasure of my driving skills in France:

Rules of the Road are very different here:

• Cars turning right onto a straightaway have the right-away. Therefore you must proceed slowly and with caution to cross streets even though you are going straight. In our point of view it seems like a car is just whipping around the corner, without looking, and quasi-cutting you off - but that is how it works here.
• Roundabouts. oh là là là là! Talk about a headache. There are signal lights in the roundabout that must be obeyed by the cars within the roundabout. On all the exits - let's say there is 4 to make this example easy, there are 4 extis and 4 entrances, so there are signal lights for all those merging/splitting lanes as well. So now we are up to 12 signal lights = 4 roundabouts + 4 merging + 4 splitting. Are you following? To make matters more complicated, the cars within the circle (which are circling around or trying to get out) have the same green as the cars merging into the circle, so the traffic in the circle must yield to the incoming traffic. It's one huge mess. and a scary one at that. I refuse to drive in the Arc de Triomphe, although there are no signal lights within that gigantic roundabout you have to be very fierce and aggressive to get in/out, it's stressful driving in it and it feels like you are going to get rear ended or get hit head-on every second, it's terrifying.
• Crosswalks. When a crosswalk is green for pedestrians sometimes it is also green for cars - this makes zero sense to me. The pedestrian always gets the right-away here, but I don't understand why they sync the two together and how no one gets seriously injured....