You know, sometimes you just feel like you’re having bad luck, right? Well lately it’s been a bit too bad for me. Within about two weeks, I left my iPod in the seat pocket of an air plane, I had crashed our car resulting in thousands of dollars in damage (covered by insurance), dropped my Blackberry cracking its screen, had a stomach bug for about two days where I couldn’t eat or drink at all, and now I’m getting soar throat. Man, oh man, does it ever end? Well, there are some good things that have happened in all of this too, if you can believe that, and I hope we can tell you about that sooner or later.
I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. Yesterday I had my first car accident. Outside Festival City in Dubai, a bus hit us from behind, smashed out the lights on one side, the rear window, and mangled the rear door so it couldn’t be closed properly. We’re doing okay, no injuries or anything, and we drove the car back home last night. It’s now in the shop and hopefully we can get it back in a week or two.
Police arrived to the scene in about 10-15 minutes. They started talking to the driver of the bus - I can only guess he’s from Pakistan - and then one police told me “you guilty”. That seemed strange to me, since he had not asked me or Crystal anything about what happened. I was going from the middle lane to the right lane, put on the indicator, looked over my shoulder, didn’t see anything, and moved over, then bang. This was shortly before a traffic light, but it was before the solid line which means that you can’t move lanes. Apparently the police said I was at fault because I should go straight, but I moved over before the solid lines, and the pieces of debree on the scene were laying all around before the solid line started, which to me shows I was okay in changing lanes.
But that didn’t apparently mean anything.
Oh, and if you’ve not had an accdident here, know that police decide on the spot who was at fault. Then they give the one they deem as the “guilty” one a pink form, and the “innocent” one a green form. That form you have to have for insurance, repairs and more, so make sure you keep it. And the form is in all Arabic. I even asked for a copy in English, and the police just smiled and said, “No English”.
I must say although I don’t quite understand the police’s reasoning, they were very nice about the whole thing. All in all it was not a very pleasant experience, but it could have been a lot worse.
Politics is not something that appear here very frequently, but this is too good to be passed on. Keith Olberman of MSNBC gives a long talk about the Scooter Libby affair and President Bush’s role.
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