Railway crossing

Driving a car, that’s no problem for my Turkish lover. Not that he ever had official lessons, but his father taught him everything when he was a teenager. So I feel perfectly safe when occasionally he is driving instead of me. Point was, he didn’t have a driving license, and that’s not so practical. Even less so now that daddy has bought a new car and the old one is just standing there doing nothing. It will be easier to borrow it if we both get our license.
This morning, it was time: driving exam. He had to be there at 8.30. Not in Istanbul, but in the village where he is registered, Ürgüp. How easy, I thought, doing a driving exam in Ürgüp (15,000 inhabitants) on an early Sunday morning. He came back at 10.30. Passed? He supposed so, he can call for the result later the same day. I asked if there was a lot of traffic on the road. No, there wasn’t: the exam was not on the public road, but on a circuit. Long circuit then, that it took so long? No, it took a long time because he had to wait in line. Wait in line? Yes, on both sides of the circuit there’s a line of candidates, you drive around the circuit, get out of the car at the end of it (about 3 to 5 minutes later), the next candidate takes over the wheel and makes the circuit in the opposite direction. Waiting in line, my friend was warned that when it was nearly his turn, he had to watch the approaching driver carefully: recently somewhere in Turkey something went wrong with the brakes, which resulted in two deaths among the waiting candidates. I asked: what sort of situations do you come up against at this circuit? At the start, he answered, there’s a sign saying ’30’. After that, they ask you to stop at a ”no-stopping” sign and check whether you obey the sign. And – and then I was definitely rolling on the floor laughing out loud – they built a fake railway crossing. There are hardly any trains in Turkey.
He just called. Baby, I passed.