I like being on the traffic island. It's not easy to "happen to be there", though. It's all about the timing of traffic lights and the speed of your walking. Recently I happened to be on the islands between a broad, busy roads with many vehicles coming and going. I was in a very strange feeling of fun, that was, at the moment I was the only human allowed to be in the middle of the place that only cars, or machines can come across. Looking those automobiles rapidly running just in front of and behind me, it felt like as if they were pure machines without any influence of human. I couldn't easily see the drivers, because those cars were rushing too fast to identify anything human. The feeling was fun, because it led me to the imagination of what it is like to be on the taxing way near (or under) the huge airplanes taking off and landing just like enormous dinosaurs. Of course it will be far from comfortable, but this imagination kept me excited as we are not allowed to just to step in to the taxing way even though there is no jets around. What if we have traffic island in the middle of ways to sky?
While I like the idea of mobility so much, I like as much the stability and immobility of masterpiece architecture. Architecture is there for people to live in, go through, look up, take shelter from rain, sleep. eat, work and grow up. Architecture is there to give us delight in daylight and nighttime. I like its unwavering world which has nothing to do with swipe, click, tap, flick, or anything that can instantly change the world you've been looking at, which, of course is also amazing.
When I was a kid I used to enjoy my father's driving in the backseat looking out from the car window. The changing scenery was attractive of course but I loved to see the other cars driving to the same direction, especially on the expressway. I looked at the driver and the passengers. Most of them were probably family members, husbands and wives, babies, couples, dogs, and kids like myself. I loved to look at the license plate and get excited if the plate had a name of some very distant, unknown city. I felt happy imagining their long journey. I looked at the car design and hood ornaments standing still in the wind of high-speed driving cars. They always reminded me of the "Winged Victory of Samothrace." I loved to see the colors of the cars, because, aside from black and white cars, the range of body colors was surprisingly wide and interestingly diverse. Rarely I found the exact same color. If I find, say, the series of blue-painted cars, there is always the difference of subtle nuance.
Why cars on expressway is special? Because we usually use expressway when we need to or wish to go far away. People can drive a long distance without stops on relatively high speed, so their driving technique is outstanding. Cars are gathering from distant cities and places. Passengers are getting ready for the long-time driving. It's full of the extraordinaries.
