October is sugar beet harvesting season in my part of Austria and since a large sugar refinery is situated between my house and the freeway, my commutes to work take longer this time of year due to tractors slowly pulling overloaded trailers down the street. There seems to be no law requiring them to pull over and let traffic past if they are holding up more than a certain maximum number of cars, as would be the case in some other countries. The situation is better in recent years as more beets are transported in large dump trucks, which move faster and don’t hold things up as much, but there is still congestion and the remaining tractors still do a good job of fucking up traffic.
Compounding this are drivers who, stuck behind such tractors, execute dangerous passing maneuvers. Normally this only pisses me off, but today one didn’t make it completely past the tractor and traffic came to a complete stop for over an hour while the fire department extracted his wreckage from the site of the accident. There was a detour, but it was also congested and it took me an extra hour to get to work.
While that is an irritating start to a Monday, I suppose the person who totaled one or more cars is even more irritated, if they survived. Probably even if they’re dead, assuming there’s an afterlife, who knows.
Fucking sugar beets.
Are sugar beets sweet as the name implies? my experiences with beets are pretty limited.
I don’t know, I’ve never eaten one and they aren’t sold in the stores here; they’re more an agro-industrial raw material I think. They must have a high sugar content, otherwise why boil them down for sugar? I’ll try one and let you know – plenty are scattered wherever the road takes a sharp turn, like in curves and on traffic circles, where they fall from the trailers.
Oops, I said “f*cking sugar beets.” I mean, I was doing pretty good for the “vomit fetish” search requests, now I’ll get the real weirdos. From Idaho and stuff.