Our First Fight with a Taxi Driver

More pictures here.

Aaron, Jason and I just got back from Tahrir Square, an area in downtown Cairo. We took a taxi, like always.

This taxi, however, was driven by a true – ahem – jerk.

Understand, taxis here don’t have meters. When you get to your destination, you get out and offer the driver a price. He will say no and offer a higher price. Eventually you work your way to something reasonable. If the driver won’t budge, we’re supposed to drop the proper amount through the passenger window and walk off. Most taxi drivers are eager to pick up westerners because we’re rich and unversed in the ways of Cairo.

The standard price for a trip from Tahrir Square to Agouza is four pounds. We didn’t have any one-pound notes, so we offered our driver this time “khamza,” a five. As usual, he demanded something higher. We weren’t going to go any higher than five, so we left him with a five and walked out.

This is where it got tricky.

The dude got out of the taxi and came around to us, waving the five-pound note at us and demanding more in Arabic. Aaron’s spent some time in Jordan so he knows some Arabic and tried to reason with him. (Later he told me he was telling the driver that we had only paid five from Agouza to Tahrir to begin with.) We wouldn’t budge, so the driver, clearly disgusted, got back in the car. As we were walking away, he spat out the window at us. In Egypt, that’s a big deal (not that it’s polite in America).

To me, it’s simple: the guy thought he could intimidate some naïve white kids into paying up. He didn’t expect us to stand our ground. Plus, it’s Ramadan, so he was probably already cranky. (He was a pretty aggressive driver – a few blocks away from our building, he almost rear-ended another car and then shouted at the other driver through his window.) I’ve been hosed by a taxi driver once before, and I’m not about to let it happen again. Aaron was a little bothered and thinks maybe we did something wrong, so he’s going to check with one of the staff here.

The upshot – I feel a little more confident bartering my way across the city now. I’ll let you know if any more drama happens.

So what were we doing at Tahrir Square? Visiting the Egyptian Museum!

It was really different from any museum in the U.S. It was like they had more priceless ancient artifacts than they knew what to do with, so they put them all in this building, roughly arranged them by time period, and added some tiny typewritten labels in Arabic, French and broken English. Some pieces had glass cases, but most didn’t. It was just there, touchable, decontextualized, and four thousand years old.

The highlight was definitely the section devoted to King Tut’s tomb. King Tut’s tomb is the only tomb that wasn’t ransacked by grave robbers over the millennia, so they have literally everything from the tomb, in near perfect condition. It’s nearly all made from gold and precious stones. There’s daggers, miniature boats, statues, beds, thrones, necklaces – they buried their kings with lots of stuff. (Most of this stuff was in glass cases.) The highlight of the highlight was seeing King Tut’s famous funeral headdress and sarcophagus (you’ve all seen them in pictures.) Some of you might remember how I obsessed over ancient Egypt in middle school. Seeing that stuff, I seriously geeked out.

Sorry – no cameras allowed, so I don’t have any pictures. (Which is kind of a funny story. We had to go through three security checkpoints to get in. Only at the third did we realize that cameras weren’t allowed. Not wanting to leave my camera with anybody, I decided just to walk through the metal detectors and hope they didn’t care. I walked through, and it didn’t beep. So far, so good. Then the guard comes up and frisks me, clearly feeling the camera case in my pocket – and just lets me through. I wasn’t going to push my luck by taking pictures, but they really need to pay their people more.)

Also, it’s a huge tourist destination. It was a little startling, after living for a week and a half among very modestly-dressed Arabs, to all of a sudden be surrounded by skimpily-dressed white people who didn’t speak English.

I learned something new this week: because the day of rest in Islam is Friday, weekends here are on Friday and Saturday. So no class today or tomorrow, but we’ll be back at it on Sunday. Weird.

Yes, classes. So far, we have a couple hours of Arabic, taught by a wonderfully entertaining and understanding Muslim woman from the American University in Cairo, and a couple hours with Dr. Holt discussing religion and politics. So far it’s been great, but I’m not looking forward to the homework. We already have a lot of reading.

This is Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of prayer and fasting. From sunup to sundown, Muslims are not supposed to eat or drink a thing – not even water. Some of them handle this by sleeping during the day (including the guard who sits outside our building with a rifle.) The rest of them, I guess, just think happy thoughts until iftar, the breaking of the fast at sundown.

The good part for me is, Jesus doesn’t care when I eat. The bad part is, most of the restaurants and businesses around here do, and they’re closed during the day (and sometimes at night too). So for a while at least, if we don’t want to cook, we’re limited to McDonald’s and KFC.

I think most of the people around here carry their meals with them, so they’re ready when the sun goes down.

When we walk the streets at dusk, we see a lot of people – street cleaners and policemen, especially - sitting on the sidewalks with little tupperware containers, going at it. Last night at iftar, the October 6 Bridge outside our flat – normally totally jammed with traffic – was virtually empty. I took a picture. Everyone’s at home, finally eating after a long day.

This is the fun part of Ramadan – every night is a party. Late into the night, the streets are filled with people eating and celebrating. Little kids get to stay up late and everything. All the streets have banners and decorations up, and most of the buildings have cool lanterns hanging out.

Also, Ramadan is a time to do a lot of praying and meditating. On the second day of Ramadan, we rode on a subway car where almost every man was either reading from the Qu’ran or reciting prayers. Normally, the five daily calls to prayer go more or less unheeded, at least from outward appearances. Now I see groups of men on the street praying together. Everyone’s mind is on religion. The poor of the city know this, so we see a lot more beggars lately.

Two days ago, we crossed the Nile to the island of Zamalek, which has a really cool park that you can get into for three pounds ($0.60). Unlike everywhere else, it’s green and has clean air, and since most of the people are too hungry to exert themselves, pretty deserted. Some of us went running, which felt good; the rest played soccer.

Yesterday some of us went back. I struck up a pathetic Arabic conversation with a fourteen-year-old boy named Kareem. (I will qualify this by saying that he didn’t look fourteen to me; maybe I just misunderstood his answer to my question.) I found out that he likes school, that his dad works for the park, that he supports Egypt in soccer matches (I probably could have guessed that), that he lives in Imbeba, and that he is the fourth of six children. He found out that I am twenty, that I am a student from America and a Christian, that I’m not married yet (where are my priorities?), that I’m living in Agouza for three months, and that I have three younger siblings. It was a bit of a struggle to talk to him, but I enjoyed it, and he must have had to also, because we talked for quite a while. Whenever I butchered the Arabic, he would give me a look and say, “What?” Whenever he said something in Arabic I couldn’t understand, I said, “Aasif,” (sorry) and shrugged. We laughed quite a bit. He apparently also thought that “oui” is an English word.

During a lull in the conversation, he got up and started to walk off. I said goodbye, he shook his head and said something in Arabic, and then stopped on the sidewalk a distance away. He took off his sandals and started the Muslim prayer routine. He was really into it. It was inspiring and sad at the same time to see a kid that young so wrapped up in his religion. Afterwards he came back. I asked him what kind of music he likes; he said “No.” I was like, “No music?” He said, “No, no, no.” Another MESPer, Chelsea, offered to let him listen to her iPod, so he could see what he was missing. He politely refused. I was a little mystified. Aaron thinks that strict Muslims aren’t supposed to listen to music at all. I’ll have to ask Dr. Holt about that. If so, that’s really depressing. (Open mind…open mind…)

Two nights ago, we watched The Message, the Muslim equivalent of the Jesus movie. It’s all about Mohammed’s revelation and his war to retake Mecca and remake the social order. It’s three hours long, and repeatedly, unintentionally hilarious, for one reason: the Islamic faith forbids showing an image of Mohammed.

The filmmakers dealt with this minor obstacle by, variously:

1) Having other characters talk about what’s happening with Mohammed offscreen.

2) Blacking out the screen when Mohammed is present.

3) Having the camera assume the viewpoint of Mohammed, so the characters essentially look at the audience and say, “Prophet, what should we do?” After a brief, silent pause, the character turns to another character, and says something like, “He says we should let the camel decide where to build the mosque!” (Not kidding).

4) Putting Mohammed just outside the camera frame.

This last example really shined during a battle scene, when Mohammed, his son-in-law Ali, and his friend Hamza, go to battle with three of the men from Mecca. All you can see of Mohammed is his sword – which is a totally BA sword with two blades, like a pair of scissors. The blades swing in and out of the frame, butchering the infidel.

Whatever else you may say about Islam, it is not a religion that lends itself to filmmaking.

Oh, by the way – next Thursday, we are going to…Mt. Sinai!!!