Habits are hard to undo: 02 (Driving in Iraq)

 

What started off the blog about driving in Taiwan was my computer repair man, Ali from Iraq who’s also a very kind man, giving me a separate keyboard for my newly bought replacement laptop, saying it’d save the keys of the keyboard on the laptop itself from wear and tear.

    He asked for feedback the next time I went to see him.  I said my hand kept trying to move the cursor from the trackpad, except that the standalone keyboard does not have a trackpad.

    He said he does the same thing with a device that does not give the option of blowing up the screen display (text or picture) using one’s fingertips (sliding them together or apart to decrease or increase the size).

    He then went on to tell me what had happened to someone he knew in the days just after Saddam Hussein’s downfall.

    This is how I remember he told the story, which Ali said still has the man’s circle of friends laughing years later.

    Foreign cars started to get imported into Iraq, whereas up to Saddam Hussein’s exit, the Iraqi people were driving old bangers from a few decades previously.

    Some of the imports were from Japan, which drives the British way, i.e., in the left hand lane of the road, with the steering wheel on the right side of the car.  As the Iraqi system is American, those who bought Japanese cars had to adapt to it — until workshops started to sprout up later on, completely overhauling them for the Iraqi roads, moving the steering wheel to the other side of the car, etc.

    One of those who’d bought a Japanese car prior to these workshops coming into existence was Ali’s friend, another Iraqi man. 

    A bit of cultural behaviour background here: Iraqi men seem to have the same habit as Chinese men — the habit of spitting.  Drivers would spit out of their car windows willy-nilly, as and when they wanted while driving.

    This friend of Ali’s forgot that he was driving a Japanese car, so he simply turned left and spat — PTUI, straight into the face of his wife sitting next to him!  More than once, throughout the journey.  (Maybe even subsequent ones, if his wife allowed him — allowed him subsequent journeys, I mean, i.e., didn’t ground him; rather than allowed him to spit into her face on subsequent occasions.)

(Iraq, post-2003)