No Rules of the Road

   All my life, I heard about how crazy the roads in Israel were. My parents met in this country in the 40s, when the place was much less developed than it is today. Everything, the cities, the infrastructure, the legal system, etc., had yet to be constructed.
  My mother described how drivers would get into screaming matches on the road, would drive as fast as they wanted at all hours and locations, backwards if they wanted to. I figured that by now, things had changed.
  No one I've seen so far has gotten into an actual brawl in the road. But there have been some goings on that make me believe that my mother was essentially correct about this issue, even if she never learned to drive herself and had little realistic idea about how that ought to be done.
  In the small town where my cousin lives, things go easily enough, but when she ventures into the city center, things have gotten a bit dicey. People make parking lots out of patches of dirt covered with rocks, garbage, broken hunks of concrete. There do not truthfully seem to be any designated lots, so they have little choice about this.
  To get into the makeshift parking lots, people must drive over pavements, helpfully striped in red to show that no parking is actually allowed. No one pays attention. Then the fun begins.
  A student driver approaches from the other side of the lot. Why the instructor would choose this place to practice in is beyond me, though I guess the best way to survive insanity is to become adapted to it as soon as possible.
  Meanwhile, from the street on the other side, two more cars inch forward in search of that elusive commodity: a parking spot.
  In the middle, we sit, sandwiched. An orthodox man stops everything he is doing to play traffic cop, patiently directing those behind us to back up, so that we too can back out, and holds off the student driver with the other hand.
  Somehow, we all get out in one piece. No fender bender. No cursing.
It is possible, evidently, to get used to even this level of automotive psychosis.