US License Plates in Amman…Why?

One of the things the kids enjoy doing in the US is playing the license plate game: keeping track of all the different American states and Canadian provinces you actually see while driving. Last summer we got all 48 contiguous (new word for me too…meanings ‘touching or in close proximity to’) states and helped them learn all the names. Until four years ago, when we Amtracked Across America , all of them had been to more countries in the world than they had states in the US. Last summer, we didn’t travel the continent, we just lived near Interstate 80, which is as close to coast-to-coast travel as you can get. We could’ve had Alaska, too, but missed finding the family who just moved from there before they had to change to Illinois plates.

It’s of those ‘ex-pat things’, the children know the names of the countries in the Arab League but not the states and capitals of their passport ‘homeland’. But how bizarre that we can play the license plate game in AMMAN? So far we have seen the black Hummer with Maryland plates, the red Ford Explorer with Florida plates, the black SUV with California plates (and the horrible driver of the navy BMW with “Laker’s are No. 1″ fake California plates) as well as Illinois, Ohio, New Jersey, Connecticut, Tennessee, Kansas and even the province of Ontario, Canada.

So why is this ok? Yella, cool someone lived in North America and brought the plates back. So what do the police do when they pull these folks over? (I know stupid question, no one gets pulled over) They have a state-by-state database on expired American license plates? I can get in trouble for not having my registration up-to-date, and these folks drive for months on another country’s plates that are also out of date?

Someone help me please, maybe I’m just an ignorant foreigner. Or maybe I should’ve kept the plates from my Triumph Spitfire (FUNTOY1) and put them on my aging mommy-mobile to provide a few laughs on the streets here and escape my yearly Jordanian registration nightmare. (btw last year they told us we had to PAINT our car within the year. The nerve. But, we did do our part to beautify Jordan’s streets).