Alley Chicken

So one of the really noticeable things about the developing world is the utter lack of parking in cities. In the US, if you want to build an apartment building or a commercial building, you generally have to provide sufficient parking spaces for the building in order to get municipal approval to build. Whereas here, it's not unusual to find a brand new apartment building with zero parking. Same with commercial buildings, especially since underground parking seems to be really rare here (and even when there is underground parking, it's only one level down). So as a result, people wind up parking in every available place they can find to fit their cars - on curbs and sidewalks, in front of "No Parking" signs, in areas reserved for emergency vehicles and, most frequently, behind an already parked car.

 

To get to work, I drive through an alley on the side of my office building, which is as wide as a normal street. Except, since there's not sufficient parking for the building, people park on either side of the alley, thereby making it a one-way, despite the fact that there are cars moving in both directions. When I first started dealing with the alley in the mornings, I acted like a nice expat - I waited to make sure no other cars were coming in my direction before entering the alley and, if a car happened to enter the alley after I did, I generally backed up to avoid any issues. This usually resulted in the Omani behind me swerving around me to enter the alley at breakneck speed (despite the oncoming car), only to then have a honking session in the middle of the alley until one car gave in and backed up.

 

Starting about a month ago, however, I decided to play what I call "Alley Chicken" (chicken being the name of the game where two cars race towards each other until one swerves, thereby being the "chicken"). Now, if there's no one already heading in my direction, I enter the alley and gun it, hoping to make it past the halfway point of the alley before someone else enters. I figure if I make it past the halfway mark, the other car has to back up, whereas I'll back up if the other car reaches the halfway mark before I do. Last week was my first Alley Chicken match - we both made it to the halfway mark at approximately the same time. And, unlike my earlier days of being the nice expat, I smiled and shook my head, indicating that the other guy should back up. And after a few minutes of hand gestures and honking, he begrudgingly backed up and I walked into the office feeling like I'd just won a really difficult negotiation.

  

I made a diagram. I'm the blue car. And clearly lining up all the parked cars in a row is a joke - in real life they're parked totally haphazardly, half sticking out into traffic. 

So yesterday, I entered the alley and made it about 3/4 of the way through before an Omani woman entered the alley. Despite seeing me coming, she kept right on driving until we were nose to nose. I indicated that she should back up and she sat there and made a phone call (my Omani coworker said she was probably calling her dad, asking for advice). Meanwhile, two other cars pull up behind me and start honking. She hangs up the phone and just stares at me, not budging, and starts to look panicked. It occurs to me that she might not actually know how to reverse her car. The cars behind me start laying on their horns, I'm trying to make hand gestures that she should back up and finally, after about 5 minutes, she very slowly, inch-by-inch, started reversing, all the while looking like she was having a panic attack. About ten feet behind her was an open spot for parallel parking, and a nice Indian man tried to help her maneuver into the spot, but it was also pretty clear that she had no idea how to parallel park. After losing about 10 minutes total, I finally made it out of the alley, grumpy and annoyed.

 

I was annoyed that someone could get a license without apparently knowing how to drive. And furious that there's never any freaking parking anywhere in this city and that we all just have to learn to live with getting trapped in a parking lot because someone parked behind our cars. And mentally I had a whole rant about how this wouldn't happen in the developed world and that, instead of promulgating practically daily new laws on things like banning live music or trying to ban booze, perhaps the government should start regulating zoning and building requirements.

 

And somewhere in the grumpiness that never dissipated throughout the day, I realized I was homesick. Don't get me wrong - I love being an expat and I love the experiences I'm getting from living in another country. But every once in a while the "foreign" part gets to be too much and I start to miss the things that I always took for granted in the US. And I guess I'm going to have to accept that if I stay over here (which still remains to be seen), every once in a while I'm going to get a wave of homesickness from something silly like a shitty parking situation. In the meantime, I'm still undefeated in Alley Chicken!