Do not fasten your seatbelt

Little scenes from driving in Yerevan:

The main means of transportation in Yerevan is a minibus or passenger van. They’re everywhere, connecting any two points in the city in a complicated network of routs. The cost is 25 cents. We were riding one of these, coming home after some hardware shopping, when the traffic slowed down and finally stopped. Of course, there was some street work going on, and of course there were no sign posted anywhere, so the drivers could learn what’s causing the traffic jam only after running right into heavy machinery digging in the middle of the street. So what does an Armenian driver do when he runs into an obstacle on the road? Undaunted, he drives right onto the sidewalk (which is, fortunately, almost as wide as the street) and makes his way through the pedestrian traffic, bypassing the construction. So picture this: mounds of dust and dirt on the road, a bulldozer and a couple of trucks blocking the narrow street and a two-way traffic on the sidewalk, with the unruffled pedestrians looking on and the lowest branches of the trees scratching the roofs of minivans. Only in Armenia…

I was riding in my ex-husbands car, once again returning from hardware shopping. Being a person of healthy habits, I pulled on my seatbelt and fastened it.
-Please don’t, - said my ex. – The police will stop us.
-Why?
-They will think we are foreigners, and foreigners are considered an easy prey. They will find any excuse to give us a ticket.

Only in Armenia…