A video showing a pair of tourists muscling a motorbike over a road median to perform an illegal u-turn has Indonesian netizens cracking up and pointing out that it’s not only locals who break traffic rules — though they also admit that the behavior is probably learned from watching drivers here.
Let’s face it, Indonesians get a bad rap for being terrible drivers, often getting called out for some alternative road antics.
So Indo netizens of course had to appreciate when a camera captures visitors to the country, or bule, (the Indonesian word for Westerner) displaying less-than-model behavior themselves.
“Bule are human too” reads playful text overlaying the video.
“Bule are also human beings, sometimes they like to be mischievous like us. But remember, don’t do like this everyone. Later you’ll get scooped up by the police,” wrote citizen site Info Denpasar, who re-shared the video, originally by Instagram user @pilartha.
“Go try that in their country, do they dare?? Bule always think there aren’t any rules here,” wrote one commenter in Indonesian.
“Fortunately no police now,” commented another.
But an overwhelming amount of comments noted that it was probably really a “monkey see, monkey do,” sort of thing, that the foreigners were just doing as they saw local drivers do.
“They looked and followed the example of the local people!” pointed out one Indonesian netizen.
“If bule are here long, they are infected by the behavior of the local people,” chimed in one.
“Bule imitate what we do,” concluded another.
Indonesian Police’s Traffic Corps (Polantas), however, used the video as a warning to Indonesian drivers not to set bad examples.
“Don’t set bad examples, bule will do like this because they often see such offenses committed on the road,” Polantas captioned the post.
This whole viral sensation reminds of when Indonesian star Nicholas Saputra stood his ground and blocked a pair of tourists on motorbike from driving over the sidewalk.
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