Drivers Ed

Driving habits of people seem to be different everywhere you go, each place having its own quirks that must be learned through experience.

And in my travels I've encountered some driving habits that are at best somewhat bizarre, and at worst downright terrifying!

In Egypt my taxi driver entered the freeway from THE EXIT RAMP, did a quick pirouette and headed towards my hotel. Granted it was 2 o'clock in the morning, but still! AND these maneuvers were all executed without his headlights! Driving at night without using your headlights on was apparently a common practice in Cairo at that time. Upon sensing another car approaching in the opposite direction, the drivers would flash their lights at each other and continue past at breakneck speeds. I found this a mite unsettling.

Now in Kyoto, they drove at night with their headlights on, but for some reason they turned them off when at a stoplight. Which I found curious, but something of a relief after India where I was quite startled to find myself sharing the roads with cows.

In Bangkok, rush hour has you dreaming wistfully about traffic on the 405 (for those of you unfamiliar Southern California and the 405 freeway, this is a place you do not want to ever be without reading material and a couple hundred sudoku puzzles) and half the population seems to have scars on their legs from injuries they sustained riding on the backs of two stroke motorcycles. Being woefully uninformed on my first trip to Thailand, I personally experienced rush hour in Bangkok from the back of a tuk-tuk, a three wheeled, open air vehicle. Tuk-tuks look really adorable and seem like a really good idea to tourists.



In Nepal, on the way back from the Chitwan jungle, my car blew not one, but ALL FOUR tires. All four! At different times. And while we weren't searching for tires we were flying around blind corners on the wrong side of the road on what was affectionately known as the Cowboy Highway. On the rafting trip down the river to the jungle we had passed many wrecked cars along the banks of the river below the Cowboy Highway. And on one particularly memorable stop, I saw people stumbling from a bus that had been driven off into a ditch.

Back in America, as a pedestrian in New York City, its every man for him or herself. People stand poised on curbs with cars whizzing past and . . . . wait for it . . . . wait for the break . . . here it comes . . . Now! Run! I was always grateful to have reached the other side of the street without getting trampled on by the swarming horde.

Conversely, back in Los Angeles, whenever a pedestrian steps one foot into the street all traffic screeches to a grinding halt all over the city. One presumes this is because seeing a person walking in LA is such a mesmerizing site that no one knows quite what to do.

But never, ever, in my life have I experienced parking lot etiquette like they have in my new town. In fact I'm not entirely sure that the inhabitants actually know what a parking lot is, let alone have an understanding about how it is generally used.

At first I was puzzled. Was it my imagination, or had I just been forced to leap out of the way of three different speeding vehicles? In the parking lot? But having studied driving behavior in several different parking lots over the last few weeks, I have been forced to come to the conclusion that the drivers in this town consider parking lots to be alternate thoroughfare with an obstacle course thrown in for fun.

People drive thru the parking lots in this town with the intensity of a NASCAR race driver on their last lap. I know Hollywood stunt drivers who could take lessons from some of these ladies.

So if I suddenly vanish from view for a few days, don't worry. I probably just got clipped by a Mercedes in the parking lot at Michael's Crafts.

Just sayin'.