The first was 1999, when we went to Lebanon, and most recently, Amman, Jordan over Thanksgiving.� There are many modern highways in the Middle East that look, for the most part, like our highways here.� In town roads are another matter, however, in that they tend to be narrower.� Beirut has many twisty, winding roads that seem to go in all directions, with no particular rhyme or reason, but they get you to where you need to go.� Because Beirut is such an ancient city, many of the roads in town existed before the concept of a car was ever conceived, and often times you may be driving down an alley that was no more than a lane built for a horse and cart.� The city was not built on a grid like many modern US cities, and instead have an "organic" feel and look to the road system. In Beirut, many of the stop lights were new at the time, as the city was just coming back to life after 15 years of a devastating civil war.� They worked just fine, but many drivers just sped right through them, even though they were red.� Roads were clearly lined for their lanes, but many drivers ignore them completely instead, choosing to drive straddling the lane markers.� I commented that the lights, stop signs, and lane markers were there merely as a suggestion.�

Amman is a little better in that most of the city is quite modern, much of it built in the 20th century, and not as old as Beirut.� In town roads very much resemble those here, multi lane highways, traffic lights, left turn lanes at intersections, overpasses, traffic turnarounds, entrance ramps onto the freeway, and what not.� And due to urban sprawl, Amman has the room to build large intersections that American drivers would feel comfortable approaching.� Traffic lights do not seem to go ignored.� However, despite modern traffic control engineering, most drivers in these cities drive pretty much the way they want, again straddling the lane markers.�� On the two lane highway to Petra, again, drivers straddle the lane markers.� On one road that is in town, that we drove often, I noticed that it was a bit ambiguous as to how many lanes it was supposed to be:� one?� two?� So I asked Tarik, "Honey, how many lanes is this road?"� He replied,� "How many do you want it to be?"

When you are making a left turn in these cities, if not at a designated left turn light, you are taking your life into your own hands.� Fast moving oncoming traffic is no deterrent for those turning left.� You see a split second opening and you take it, taking it on faith that no matter how fast the oncoming car is going, that they will slow down and allow you to cross their path.� I braced myself often, in almost sheer terror waiting for the impact that never came.� I will say this for Jordan though, they do have police that patrol and monitor traffic, give out speeding tickets, set up speed traps along the highway complete with radar monitoring, and they DO pull people over.� I think on the way to Petra we were probably doing 80mph, which is not unreasonable, but I could not tell because the speedometers are in kph (kilometers) and I don't know the conversion to metric.� I was comfortable with this speed even though there were drivers flying by us.� Scary in that many of them were rickety old busses that looked like they couldn't get past 40 mph.� Fortunately, we saw no accidents on the highway, and I think only one in town, and it was just a fender bender.� I DO remember though that we did see one pretty bad wreck on the freeway outside of Beirut, but, that was 6 years ago so the details are pretty fuzzy.

Needless to say, I am a bit nervous about Tarik driving around over there, but, he has been there for two years now, knows his way around really well and has really gotten the hang of it and drives like a Jordanian.� Now, if I can just break him of that habit when he gets home....

Song virus du jour:� "Epic" ~ Faith No More