Only in Israel

• The freebee magnet you get from the dentist tells you what time to light Shabbat candles and what the Torah portion is every week.
• You need your passport number (in lieu of an Israeli ID number) in order to mail a package at the post office.
• Traffic lights turn yellow, before they turn green, so that drivers can be ready to step on the gas the second the light changes.
• You pay your bills at the post office.
• Once, on a bus, passengers in the back started yelling “Fire! Smoke!” The bus driver stopped and got off, telling us to stay on the bus. Several of us got off anyway. Only in Israel would the bus driver yell at you for getting off a potentially on-fire bus, and make you get back on, just cause he said so. (Don’t worry, he drove 30 feet to the next stop, and we all got on the next bus. Never found out what happened to the first one. Sorry for scaring you, Ima.)
• In Nachlaot (a neighborhood in Jerusalem), the benches have funny, pipe-like dividers down the middle—so that Orthodox couples on a date can sit on them and be sure not to touch.
• The buses say “Gmar Chatima Tovah”—“May you be signed (in the Book of Life) for good” during the 10 days between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur.
• Daylight savings time starts early, the night before Yom Kippur, so that our fast can start and end one hour earlier. (The West Bank and I think also maybe other Muslim countries did this too—they changed their clocks a month ago, before Ramadan, for the same reason.)
• The whole city congregates in the streets on Yom Kippur night after Kol Nidre—there’s not a single car on the road.
• Even restaurants have built sukkahs on the sidewalk.