Holy Crap! Watch OUT!!!

Ok... long ago, I promised a blog posting about the amazing driving stylings of the Turks, and have only just recently gotten the photos that this would be confusing without. So without further ado... lets talk about the traffic laws that aren't. For reals... anything goes: driving with your child on your lap while your other child hangs out of the sunroof, driving with 13 people in one car, or on one motorcycle for that matter.  All perfectly leagal. On top of that, there are no actual lanes that anyone follows.  Whether that means driving into oncoming traffic because you want to go faster, or driving 4 lanes deep on one street. There are no speed limits, seatbelt laws, helmet laws... nothing. We tried our hardest to get pictures of all of this for you, but struggled with how fast they whiz by us.

It's hard to see, but sitting on mom's lap is a little boy.  Notice that mom sits in side saddle (cus she's a lady) and never holds on... except to an infant, or sometimes a watermelon.

Turks have a keen ability to balance on a speeding vehicle, amazing bravery for tackling traffic nightmares like they do, and a can-do spirit when it comes to treating their motorcycles like mini-vans.

Notice how much extra room there is when the child stands in the front? You could fit three more kids, the groceries, and a dog on there. And often they do. 

Another common and hilarious sight is the man who drives the "shoe-mobile" (I named it that). this wise entrepreneur doesn't bother paying for a store or a booth at a bazaar to sell his shoes, but displays them all over the hood and roof of his car.  This way he can be open for business anywhere he deems to be a good location.  When he decides to move on, instead of waisting time moving the shoes inside and redesplaying them somewhere else, he just drives like that.  With all of his merchadise on display. 

 One of my favorite moments so far was taking the bus to the airport to go to Switzerland.  The bus doesn't actually stop at the airport, so when we got near the exit the driver just yelled out, "Airport!" pulled over to the side of the road and told us to get out.  Now... we were on the shoulder of the freeway.  So we had to take our bags and run across three lanes of speeding traffic, jump through the oleander in the center divider, and run though three more lanes of traffic coming from the opposite direction to get to the taxi waiting to take us the rest of the way.  I felt like I was trying to illeagally cross a boarder with all of my most dear posessions. 

When the taxi dropped us off on the freeway, on our way home, we had to HAIL the bus. Worked out just fine.