(Sixteenth of a Series)

Altogether in Egypt, we saw no stop signs and two traffic lights. All intersections are open intersections. You stick the nose of your car into traffic and you keep going. The highway has generally three lanes painted on the road, but in most areas, there are five cars across at any given spot on the highway.

If the car in front of you is going slower than you like, you simply drive around him. You don't look first to see if the lane is clear, you just drive around him. If you are about to cut somebody off, he will simply honk at you. Unlike in America, there is no offense in being honked at. It's the way drivers talk to each other. If you are about to side-swipe someone already in the other lane, he will move over within the lane and share the lane with you.

Two things surprise me. First, there is rarely gridlock. To be sure, there are traffic slowdowns, but rarely gridlock. Drivers usually have some place they can move to, so they are always in motion. They can communicate with each other using a language that goes above the spoken word. They expect the other cars to proceed as they do. Driving American style would confuse other drivers on the road, and that would create the gridlock they've managed to avoid.

Another surprise is that we saw only one accident. Now from what I saw, a passenger car made a wide left hand turn, and clipped the side of a minivan that was stuck in his right-hand lane. Since the total speed of the two cars couldn't have been more than 5 mph, injury seemed not a concern. And then the two drivers involved got out of their cars, and entered into a fist fight.

I understand that I am unfamiliar with the rules of fault in Egypt, but the mechanics of the fight confounded me. To begin with, the van driver was about 6 inches taller than the car driver. Further, the fault seemed to lie with the little guy, the car driver. Yet the little guy seemed to be the aggressor of the fight. You would think that with the size advantage, as well as with the rules of fault, that the big guy would be the aggressor.

Tricia added some perspective: "You never know what [the big guy] said to him."