A milestone & Crazy Emiraties!

Firstly...

Somehow, 100 people out there in the blogosphere have decided to follow my blog. I am also amazed at the facebook followings as well... at the time of writing this it was standing at 284 people. I'm vain and like to be followed (!) so a big thank you to all of you who follow me and my blog!

=)

I want to share a story with you all about my good friend "Dave" (thats not his real name, and I often use Dave as a replacement name for many people). Christmas, 2007. Dave was driving back from a meeting in Sohar and was being harassed on the road by this dude in a Swift. There were a lot of trucks in one lane and he was driving at 130KM/h but the swifty wanted to be more... swift? This Swift driver was blaring it's horn, shining it's full beams in his rear view mirror permanently, and tail gating Dave.

Finally a gap between trucks that Dave felt was large enough for him to safely move into materialzed in the left lane and just as he was moving into it, the swift undertakes him and draws level with him. The driver is shaking his fist at Dave and blaring his horn. Dave had not been in the country for a very long time and so reacted how he would have where he grew up - he flipped the swift the bird!

The swift driver got even more mad and then went in front of Dave and then slammed on his brakes, nearly causing a major accident and kept telling Dave to pull over to the side of the road. Dave thought this guy was a lunatic and just wanted to get away from him and so ignored the nut case and carried on driving back to Muscat. He told me the story when he returned and I told him.... dude you cant flip the bird here, you'll get in trouble.

Sure enough, he got a call from the ROP in Sohar - he had to report to the Sohar police station and bring his passport. Off he went with his PRO, and the ROP confiscated his passport, but the swift driver didnt come, and so after waiting for 3 hours he returned to Muscat. This was repeated, and then on the third time, the so outraged (but can't be bothered to show up) swift driver turned up.

And then the stories began. Apparently Dave was spitting on his car, yelling obscenities about the drivers family and goats, everything you can think of. Thankfully Dave had the foresight to bring his PRO who translated all of this and afforded Dave the chance to deny these accusations.

A long story short, Dave got shaken down for RO 1,000 to make that Swift driver drop his case.

Now I shared that story with you for 2 reasons -

1) No matter how bad someone is driving and how much they may be irritating you, keep those fingers around the steering wheel!

2) I read with some amusement at this story in the UAE. A Pakistani man appealed his sentence and deportation order to the highest court in the UAE, the Court of Cassation. However this court just rubber-stamped the previous ruling. Madness, but there you are.

Have you ever been in trouble for flipping the bird?

le fin.