The Nokia Snake

October 12, 2025

This dispatch might just be the hardest one yet, as it involves probably one of the most circuitous, arcane, illogical and down right insensible traffic interchanges I have ever encountered — and I’ve been to Moscow and Beijing.

Picture that you’re driving, and perhaps moving along an east-west road and you want to cross, oh, I don’t know, a certain bridge, to get to the other side of town that is perpendicular to your route, so north-south. The most obvious image one might conjure is of an intersection, where the east-west and north-south streets intersect, guarded by a traffic light or even a roundabout. You wait your turn, make a left or right (depending on your direction) and voila — you’ve entered the access road to the bridge and it’s all smooth sailing from there. You made it on the bridge.

But what if you lived in Trenčín?

Then this simple task is impossible.

“No soup for you.”

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In fact, Trenčín has one of the most complex traffic patterns I have ever witnessed; there is no direct way to enter/exit the bridge — let alone that ‘the bridge’ in question is referred to as either the car bridge, the road bridge, the old car bridge, the old road bridge, the feeder road bridge, or the yellow bridge, but not that yellow bridge, the other one — you must circle around (twice), pass over, then under, then loop back and up and only then have you entered the bridge lane.

It’s taken me weeks to sort of comprehend which way is up; cardinal axis points seem to have been swept away; Amelia Earhart, unfortunately, would feel right at ease in this navigational black hole. If you’re coming from the taxi stand in the centre, you drive along a normal enough street. You have to take a slight left onto the main road, which, by amateur eyes such as mine, is the street that leads you onto the bridge. But no. That’s just the street that takes you beside the road that eventually becomes the bridge entry. In fact, at one point this main road — the one that should be an access point to the bridge but is just the road that gets you to the road that gets you to the bridge — is less than five meters from its neighbour! I know this because today I brought a tape measure with me to measure this asinine distance. I recently took my own car on this route to see what it’s like to drive, it’s either hell or a joy for the cabbies, I’m not sure yet. But when I drove, crossing this point, I thought: all it takes is a little bump over this concrete curb and the smushing of a tiny shrub under my wheels and I’d be on my way. Why don’t they just cut a little sluice in there and let the cars run free? Why pen them up?

But anyway — that’s just the start. Once you pass by that little spot where the ouroboros almost turns back and eats itself, you still drive straight ahead, past the Prior shopping centre, then past the abandoned hotel run by the bad landlord, then past a parking lot (one hour, €1, good deal), then you curve dramatically to the right, where another parking lot encircles a church and Buby’s Antique Shop. You’ll keep curving and curving. The G-Forces at some point begin to kick in, your car is now in the hands of physics.

Next, you’ll merge onto yet another street. And what awaits is an inglorious sight: that bridge you want to be on, the one that takes you across the river and to your bed? You go under it, not over. This view is a tease, a traffic engineering taunt to ridicule you for thinking bridge entry was a straight-ahead task. The bridge sits there, discarding yellow flakes of paint onto the road below, flicking flecks of concrete at you as if they were boogers. This bridge drips with disdain. If it was a person, I imagine Nina Hagen, complete with slowly melting mascara by the lights of some dank Berlin night club in the 1970s, with Iggy Pop and David Bowie doing blow while soldiers from the DDR shout through megaphones something like “THERE IS NO SURRENDER!”

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Anyway, you make it through that crucible and still yet another curve, but at least this time you circle up, past the Hviezda cultural centre, past an empty lot bound by a rusting iron fence, and then, depending on the time day, you’re either stopped at a red light or you may pass directly. Cross that threshold, and you’ve pretty much made it to the entryway of the bridge — but not quite. Another few hundred meters, this time you pass by that previous chokepoint of five meters and witness the other poor suckers who are just starting their own drive to get on the bridge. Remember the Nokia snake game, the one where you try not to eat your own ass lest you start all over? I often wondered if whoever designed these roads was either a Nokia snake fanatic or perhaps was so disheartened and defeated by that game that they decided to live it out on a 1:1 scale, greedily lusting after the drivers from high up in the bad landlord’s abandoned hotel, laughing hysterically at us poor fools as we spin around and around and around.

“I COULD HAVE MADE AN INTERSECTION!” I imagine him insanely snickering. Instead, you keep looping up and up and up on this mad not-genius’s roadworks until finally, there it is: the bridge crests into view like a beautiful penumbra, a bone straight path home.