Ashley's Arabian Adventure

I have a multitude of taxi stories and I thought I should document them. My friends here all think they are hilarious, but I think I little bit of background might be necessary to think these are funny if you don't live here. So here's the rundown on taxis here. Girls sit in the back and don't talk other than to give directions and boys sit in the front and chat it up with the driver the whole way. The driver might try to take you the long way so that you have to pay more or he might just want to get you there and get pissed if you direct him a long way. When you pay with bills and need change back the driver will probably round down your change and give himself a tip, but every once in a while they round the other way. Sometimes they act like they don't realize you wanted change back and then try to shame you when you ask for it. Not having exact change pretty much assures a taxi situation.

I am often in a taxi alone and being a girl, this can go several different ways. It is totally inappropriate for the driver to talk to me about anything other than where we are going. Since I am white, I think they feel like I might not be aware of this and it is okay. If the driver is nice and the conversation is reasonable, I might talk with them just to practice Arabic. Usually I pretend I don't hear them and look out the window. One of their favorite questions is "Are you Russian?" To this I always emphatically reply "No!" and do not respond to anything else they say. This pretty much means "Hey, are you a prostitute by chance?" So there's the overview and here are the stories.

Most recently I was getting out of a taxi and thought the meter said 75. So I gave him 75 exactly and he started yelling at me. I didn't really know what he was saying, but I realized that he was not happy with the amount I gave him. I told him "I gave you 75" and he continued yelling and told me that the meter said 78. No one here ever uses pennies and rounding up and down to the nearest 5 is perfectly acceptable everywhere. So the 3 cents definitely was not worth getting angry about. Anyway, I suddenly remembered that I had oddly been given pennies back in my change the day before and hoped there were 3. When I opened my wallet and saw that there were exactly 3, I gladly pulled them out and handed them to him. His response to this was to was to yell even more. He of course expected me to give him another 5 or 10. This easily made my day.

A while back I was in a taxi on a three lane road that had four lanes of cars actually driving on it. As we were coming to a place where we needed to turn left he ended up all the way in the right lane since that line was shortest. I was curious as to where he thought we were going, but as the light turned green I saw that he knew where we were going and we did indeed turn left from the rightmost lane. Love it.

One time I was on my way home from work and the guy took me this crazy long way home. As he started to go a way I didn't want him to go I told him to turn and he refused. I was a little worried, but he kept telling me "No problem, no problem." By the time we got there, it ended up costing almost twice what it normally does. I told him that he took me the long way so I was going to pay him what it always is. I gave him the money and got out and he screamed at me out the window as I walked to my door. I was really scared and looked out the window of my apartment to see if he was still there. He was. He sat there for like 10 minutes and he knew where I lived. Eventually he drove away, but I kept thinking maybe I should have just paid him what he asked for. I hate getting ripped off with the skin color tax though.

I could tell a whole lot more, but I think that's good for now. Hope you enjoyed another aspect of life in the Middle East!