Yesterday after I left the Women's Bible Study I attend, I was pulled over by a traffic cop. After coming out of the neighborhood, I needed to turn right, but there was median so I had to go left and shortly afterwards there was a break in the median with an actual turn lane (so extremely rare). I got in the turn lane and made my u-turn. About 50 feet down the road was the policeman who waved me over. The traffic police here just stand on the side of the road, they don't drive police cars and have no radios. I could have tried to ignore him and just kept on driving, but that's a pretty hard thing to do when your American culture has ingrained in you to respect and obey the police. We greeted each other and then I asked if I was not allowed to turn where I did, people make u-turns like that on a road with a median all the time, but the tricky thing is only certain breaks in the median are to be used for u-turns, there are of course no signs to indicate which ones you can use or not use. He told me that where I turned was only for cars turning onto the side street there, not for u-turns. Now, as I mentioned there was an actual turn lane, something very rare, and although I was on a major street, the side street this rare turn lane was for was not impressive. It was barely paved and certainly didn't look like a major thoroughfare. Maybe someone important lives down the road? He asked me to read reason #21 in his ticket book, careless and inappropriate use of a vehicle, fine 40,000sh ($20). I was a bit perturbed at this, it was not a careless u-turn, there were no cars coming. If anything it was just an illegal u-turn. I apologized to him, told him that I didn't live in this area of town and wasn't familiar with it, that there was no sign so I didn't know that I couldn't turn, etc. He showed me his ticket book and pointed out the fines that other people were paying, also 40,000sh. Was this his way of asking for a bribe? If so, it was way too subtle for me. I was tired and maybe a bit nonchalant about the whole thing. I didn't try and bribe him nor did I try to talk my way out of the ticket. While I didn't want to pay a ticket, I figured overall 40,000 wasn't too bad. (later Shauen told me that it would have entailed them impounding my car at that time and taking it to the downtown police station, I would go to the bank, pay the ticket, and then come back and get the car...if I knew all this I don't think I would have been so nonchalant!) In our conversation it came up that my husband was a pastor here (vicar/pastor - it's pretty much the same thing here), I was American and this was my first baby. Who knows what it was that resulted him in letting me go. Maybe he saw I wasn't going to bribe him, maybe because my husband was a pastor, maybe because I'm American, in other words President Obama, or maybe because of my pregnant belly. I like to think it was the pregnant belly that did it!  -Krista