Crash: an Abu Dhabi Photo Story

the other day a guy opened his door into my car and made minor scratch on the rear door and wheel hub. he was a being a dick about it so I followed procedure and had the traffic police come decide whether or not he had to pay. cop comes and automatically tells the guy that he was at fault, and that it was his responsibility to pay. I found out from accident report that he is one wealthy motherfucker (son of AD mercedes dealership owner). take the accident report to my insurance to open a claim. have all the correct documents so all's good.. take the claim/referral to mussafah - the 'industrial zone' of abu dhabi, located about 35 km south, deep in the desert. finally found the garage I was destined for and parked. this is when things began to get weird. I found the guy that was handling referrals, surrounded by a group of other guys. he knew I was coming so he quickly grabbed my claim and went to survey the (minor) damage to my car. I understood that he was assessing the damage, but what were all these other guys doing? I decided to document this strange situation and they very quickly caught on to the fact that I was shooting away.. by now I'm beginning to realize that the extended group, all with clipboards of their own are delegates from different body shops in the area, taking relevant details so that they can then provide quotes to the insurance company. they thought the 'foreigner taking pictures' was kinda funny so I kept shooting. they were done with my car in about 2 minutes. I was handed back my insurance referral and told that I would be contacted about how and when the damage to my car would be fixed. by this stage a couple of them were encouraging me to follow and shoot some more so.. I did! driving in AD, especially in a smaller car, you are regularly subject to aggressive 'vehicular' bullying, and sometimes it doesn't always end well. it was a total spin to spend 15 mins in a place where there was so much road carnage, but the last couple of pics.. really sent it home. tl;dr: if you scratch someone's car don't be a dick, and drive safe..