Taxi woes and funnies

This morning, one block from the Hostel, my taxi ran out of gas. Truly. Ran out of gas. We quietly coasted to a stop, just barely out of the lane of travel. My driver turns to me and babbles a whole lot of Arabic that I can’t understand and ends with a word that resembled, “Petrol”. Ah – yes, the engine is no longer running. We are out of gas.

He is very cheery about the whole thing and quickly gets out of the taxi and opens the trunk, from which he removes a Jerry Jug. I watch as he removes A gas cap from the filler tube (notice I did not say THE gas cap, as the one he removed was wrapped with plastic grocery bags to make it “fit”). He then pulls a wooden dowel rod out of the trunk. This caught my attention.

It took almost no time to figure out that the Jerry Jug did not have a spout (or a real lid, for that matter, it was another plastic grocery bag). He used the dowel rod to shove down the filler tube, opening up the “safety flap”, and also to give the gas something to “run down” to get it into the tank. He added somewhere between half a liter and a liter of gas.

Yes, you read that correctly.

He then threw all the implements back in the trunk and we merrily trundled off to AUC.

I must mention, this is WAY better than my driver to AUC the previous morning, who spend the entire ride telling me, in pidgin English, about his five “bee-bee’s”. His oldest daughter has breast cancer. She is going for an operation. If she doesn’t have 2 liters of blood (costing 300LE) then she will die. He has no money.

We spent the 10 minute ride with him wailing, pulling at his hair and crying. He kept insisting that he needed money to get blood for his daughter. I paid him a little extra when I got out of the taxi, and he wailed about his daughter…until I walked away. At which point, he ceased his wailing and gnashing and resumed his driving. Business as usual.

Every day (and every taxi) is a new adventure. I’m really getting to love this place.

ADDENDUM (the next day):  It happened again!  My taxi this morning ran out of gas.  It was lurching and sputtering, and I thought, “This car is just about out of gas” when the engine went silent.  THIS driver flagged another driver to take me to AUC, and unfortunately I had no extra “small money” (an upcoming post) so the first driver got no money and the second one got the full fare.

One other note: Streets.  There are one-way and two-way streets.  Apparently one just “knows” this, or can assess it by the direction of parked cars (not always conclusive) or the direction that OTHER cars are going on that street.  The street beside the hostel is (I think) a one-way.  However, in true Cairene fashion, as Jack and I were coming home from the symphony last evening, we gave the cabbie directions.  We had him turn UP our side street – which is apparently a one-way (the opposite direction of what we told him).  He did not even twitch.  He drove the wrong way up the street for one block, past a passle of policemen, and turned to drop us off in front of the hostel.  I guess “street direction” is merely the direction one is going, not a designation, just a suggestion.