Skip to main content

Crash 2

I was hanging around in the street watching the world go by when I heard a crunch. In a very Albanian kind of collision one of the pony-drawn carts that the Roma use had run into the back of a Volkswagen Golf parked nearby. The front right of the cart had hit the back left of the car damaging the bumper and the side panel.

After a brief inspection of the damage the 'driver' of the cart climbed back up and took off as fast as he could, leaving the unfortunate owner of the car to deal with the consequences.

This was bad, but what was really bad was that the policeman who was standing not 20 feet from me and no more than 60 feet from where the crash happened did absolutely nothing - he didn't go to the scene, he didn't talk to the man with the pony and cart, he didn't call anyone on his radio, nothing.

Only when the pony man was a dot in the distance did he wander down to the car and have a look at the damage, though as far as I could see his interest was driven by curiosity rather than professional responsibility.

I had to go out so didn't see what happened when the owner of the car came back, but I hope he gave the cop some serious grief. Now why doesn't this kind of thing happen to people who own Touareg's?

Labels:

Comments

Miss Kim said…
Saw a car knock two guys flying off their motorcycle today... no helmets of course--arghhh!
9:27 pm
An Albanian in NoVA said…
Get off your high horse. You stopped making any sense once you started saying that a "nice car gives you a sort of status and people are nicer to you." Why would you be ok with something like that? Oh right, you like having brown-nosers pretend to like you, becuase I guess that makes you feel a bigger man. I'm sorry but it's exactly people like you that are ruining Albania with their extremely selfish and materialistic views. And congrats for turning this into a political discussion, when it wasn't. Grasping at straws perhaps?

As for Touregs, and SUV's in general, I could see why people in Albania would prefer them, considering the state that some of our roads are in, although I still believe that a car is a better option. I live in DC and everybody is well aware of the American love affair with SUVs/trucks. However I still choose to drive a car, with a lower center of gravity, faster acceleration and better handling than an SUV. Sure there are times when an SUV would be a better fit, like last Thursday when I needed room for a few people and their golf clubs, but those are rare circumstances and prior arrangements can be made for those. And I'm not even going into the whole environmental issue with driving gas guzzlers.
1:56 am
olli said…
Anonymous, the Touareg thing is just a bit of a joke following my earlier post about my encounter with a Touareg driver. Your comments were quite interesting until the last bigoted and offensive comments. That's why you have been deleted.
1:13 pm
Anonymous said…
Hi frends

Let as talk about the corrupted policeman and irresponsibel driver and not about uninteressting thing who is what driving.

I would instead of you noticed the ID Number of the policeman and the one from the car.

These kind of behavior may not remain unpunished

By
12:37 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Albania and the Perils of the 21st Century

Another article on religion in Albania appeared yesterday. Patrick Poole, writing in the American Thinker , argues that Saudi funding for the construction of mosques and the training of imams is a threat to Albania, since these mosques and imams reflect the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia.
34 comments
Read more

Kamëz Part 3

For those who want a lengthy detailed report into the election there will, undoubtedly, be a range of them to chose from. In the meantime, here are my brief reflections on the last few weeks. At the heart of the problems around this election is the unwarranted influence of political parties on all aspects of the electoral process. Every institution responsible for organising and facilitating the election is under the control of political parties. The Electoral Code itself was heavily revised only days before the original date for the elections and only weeks before the actual date (Law 9676 13 January 2007). It was these revisions, specifically Article 181/2, that created the overly complicated identification requirements that caused so much confusion, and undoubtedly disenfranchised some voters. Let's be clear though: these revisions were not designed to protect the interests of the electorate. They were drafted primarily because the political parties do not trust each other. The ...
27 comments
Read more

Big in Albania

Ask me how much I knew about Albania before coming here and my list would be a short one: Enver Hoxha, bunkers and Sir Norman Wisdom. I have no idea when or how I acquired this extensive body of knowledge, but the association of Norman Wisdom with Albania was by far the most interesting part of it. I remember watching Norman Wisdom's old films on British television. My parents were fans of his wholesome, slapstick comedy, but apparently missed the ideological significance of Pitkin's relationship with Mr Grimsdale. Pitkin, the downtrodden and oppressed representative of the workers, triumphed every time over his capitalist oppressor, Mr Grimsdale - and he got the girl. It took a theorist of Hoxha's insight and profundity to discern this deeper political message. It always seemed tremendously unlikely, yet the story of Sir Norman's fame in Albania has been reported in worthy sources like the BBC , the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph . According to the Guardian, when Wi...
22 comments
Read more