Beware of old men riding bikes!

Today is such a beautiful day that I decided to walk to Kristian's job at lunchtime so we could have coffee. There's this nice wide sidewalk, and, like a good American, I was keeping to the right-hand side when some old guy on a bike rode by, turned his head and gave me a death look, and said something grouchily to me.

Unfortunately, there's no chance my Croatian is good enough for me to understand what a Croatian-speaker says as he rides by me on a bike with his head half-turned and lunchtime traffic going by.  So, over coffee, I asked Kristian about the situation.

He said, "You were probably walking in the bike lane."

I said, "Bike lane?"

The sidewalk IS divided into lanes with a solid yellow line between them.  Without even considering what that might mean in Croatia, I just automatically behaved as though the sidewalk was a two-way street and you should walk on the right-hand lane.  

Incidentally, here two-way streets have solid WHITE lines dividing the lanes. It's funny how the meaning of something as abstract as a painted yellow line would be so deeply ingrained in my understanding of how the world functions that even in a foreign country I didn't really question if it meant something different here.  But at the same time, it's hard to be constantly alert to the implications of every little detail of your surroundings.  If you think about it, you learn how to function in your home country so gradually as you grow up.  You grocery-shop with your mom when you're small, you wash your first load of clothes probably as an adolescent, you take driver's ed as a teenager, you learn how much of a tip to leave at a restaurant somewhere along the way.  Then you move to another country, and all at once all of those things are carried out a little bit differently, but you're already an adult, so you're just supposed to know.

The only thing to be done, really, is to be able to laugh at yourself.  Frequently.