Traveling internationally has its side-effects. There’s of course jetlag, which has its own set of side-effects: headaches, nausea, exhaustion, dehydration, etc. – depending on who you are. Then there’s the travel itself, with all that that entails: packing and unpacking, and my favorite: exchanging currency back and forth, knowing that each time you do it you’re losing money and there ain’t nothing you can do to prevent it.

Having just come back from a short visit in Israel, I am reminded of a third side-effect which strikes me every time I travel: culture shock. And I’m talking about American culture.

Obviously, whenever you go to a foreign country, you encounter an entirely new set of customs, social mores, whatever. But what surprises me every time is that after spending some time in a foreign country and getting used to its quirks, I am struck when I return to the U.S. about how different we are here. And sure enough, as I stepped out of the airport the other day and rode back to my apartment in the city, I found myself surprised at how different cabs are in the United States from those in Israel.

There are taxis in every country, and in every country they are different – that’s a given. I’m not going to pontificate on the differences between rickshaws, London cabs, Yellow cabs, and whatever else – the differences are kind of obvious. What hit me was the difference among the cab drivers. Whether your cab driver is an immigrant from southeast Asia, Latin America, Europe, or a native-born American, one thing is pretty much uniform among them. They keep quiet. Unless you are prone to engaging your cab drivers in conversation, they’re going to keep their mouths shut. They might even keep the glass partition shut. If there’s any talking, the driver will talk to someone on his hands-free cellphone.

Not so in Israel.

First of all, there’s no attempt to separate the driver and passenger. Quite the opposite: it’s kind of a given that you’re going to have a conversation. When you get into the cab, you get in the front seat.

Once you’re in, the conversation begins. First things first: negotiating the fare. Do you want to pick a round number and just pay that? Do you want the meter to start running? After you’ve settled on the price or the meter, he’ll usually ask you how to get to where you want to go. Being a cab driver in Israel doesn’t come with the requirement of knowing the streets of the city you’re in.

Then comes the meat of the conversation – and whatever’s on the cab driver’s mind is going to be the topic of conversation. Could be politics, could be religion. Definitely something about the traffic. If you’re quick, you can start him on a topic of your choice, but you have to be fast.

Last week, taking a cab in Jerusalem, I mentioned that I liked the song on the radio – turned out that it was his CD, and we started to talk about different kinds of music. At one point he started to skip ahead among the tracks, and then he paused on a song and I said ‘oh, I like this song – stay on it.’ He turned to me and said ‘even if you didn’t like it I would stay on it, Habibi – this is an amazing song.’ Another time my brother and I took a cab at around midnight to Sima, one of Jerusalem’s famous restaurants. When we got there the cab driver turned angrily to us: ‘great! Now I have to take a break! I can’t drive you here and not eat something myself.’

All of these thoughts ran through my mind as I sat in the cab on the way home from the airport. And jetlagged and exhausted as I was, I kind of missed the familial conversation, and I leaned forwards towards the partition in the cab. “So what was with this smell in New York the other day?” I asked. “Yes, we are going to New York,” came the answer. I gave up, leaned back, and looked out the window.

Ah, New York.

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