Highway To Hell

The other night I went to an engagement party of one of my friends (Congrats Karim!!! I doubt you’ll ever lay eyes on this blog though) at a villa in Sherouk, it was a real nice looking place and it had a swimming pool in the garden so I felt like I was in one of MTV’s cribs programs http://www.mtv.com/ontv/dyn/cribs/series.jhtml#/ontv/dyn/cribs/series.jhtml. The party was great, it had everything: Arabic music, dancing, booze (The closest thing to booze I have ever drunk is probably Lucozade http://www.lucozade.com/ and dancing isn’t exactly my expertise), chicks and food. Most important of all was that my friend really enjoyed himself and was extremely happy when I talked to him the day after the party. You’re probably wondering at this point what this has to do with the theme of my blog, well I’m getting there so hang on. After picking some mates its time to hit the Highway (i.e. the Suez Road or whatever it’s called), so I put my AC/DC-Iron Maiden cd on (ROCK ON!!!!) and headed towards El-Sherouk. One of the AC/DC songs on my cd was “Highway To Hell”, while listening and singing along to it, in the middle of my journey on the Suez motorway I started thinking; could I consider this highway as a “Highway to Hell”……Of course not, because Hell would have some decent lighting so people could see where they were going unlike the road I was on. I must have driven for at least ten minutes with my car lights on the highest just to make out what was ahead of me by about ten metres. Electricity isn’t that expensive you know, and I’m sure that the government has a few bob to spare to light up the roads. They’ve completely ignored the purpose of having lights in cars which is so that drivers can have an idea if there are any vehicles in front of or behind them - not to actually see the license plate numbers, car name and model or fellow drivers’ facial features. Back to the party, booze was being served left, right and center and a few people got drunk, now I don’t know whether the people who got drunk actually drove or not but this got me thinking, is there any sort of system that traffic police have so they can stop drivers and give them those breathalyzer’s to measure the concentration of alcohol in the driver’s blood? Does any sort of system like that exist here in Egypt? Even though Egypt is supposed to be an Islamic country (to me a country is a country, I see no difference) and I presume that the Egyptian government considers that there are not many people who do drink alcohol (Pure speculation on my behalf), but no matter how many people do, whether everyone or just one person, drinking and driving has never helped anyone.