So this morning I waived down a cab at my usual spot, took the usual route, arrived at my usual destination in front of my office and got charged over 1/3 the usual price. Now, granted, I should have been paying closer attention on my ten minute ride to work. I shouldn't have relaxed and read my book. I should have compulsively checked the meter and told the driver immediately when I noticed the cost was rising at 130% its normal rate. But silly me, I assumed my driver was an honest guy and his meter hadn't been tampered with and didn't notice the cost "adjustment."
I pay 10 pounds on a 7 pound bill every day to and from work because I'm a nice girl and know drivers are poor so I tip well. Still without noticing the meter, I asked if the driver had change for a twenty and he said he didn't. This is absurd because most rides are at least 5 pounds so the idea that he didn't have ten pounds already by ten in the morning just from fares is impossible, not to mention he had to have his own money on him separate from his fares. So, still assuming the meter was the usual price, I gave him the seven pounds I had and walked off. He started honking and screaming at me like crazy and I, still not realizing the meter price was way high, walked back to see what his problem was, after all, I'd paid the cost of the ride, just not the tip I usually give because I was pissed he wouldn't give me change.
So then we got in a big fight out in front of the bank across the street from my office. Two guards came over to help and I said that I wanted to pay ten but he wouldn't give me change and they said I should go into the bank to get change. This is total bullshit, as the custom dictates that the driver is the one who has to get change, since it is his job, but still, I'm flexible, so I agree to go into the bank. In that instant two things happen. A very nice, adorable (he looks like Woddy from Toy Story as a teenager) Egyptian lawyer who works in my firm came over to ask what the problem was, and the driver pointed out that I owed him 10.95 pounds, not 10. I was horrified because not only was this way over what I normally pay, it is also not possible on a working meter since they go up in increments of .25.
Plus it was embarrassing that I was having this argument over about 80 cents in front of the lawyer from my firm but he and the guards didn't believe the meter was rigged. Every foreigner I know has experienced a rigged meter at least once. The white taxis are part of a government initiative to get the ancient and probably dangerous black and white taxis off the streets but the meters give the driver a lower rate than they could probably negotiate with tourists (i.e. white people) in their old black and white cabs. So they get the meter "fixed" so they can hit a button during the ride and increase the rate of the meter. Drivers don't do this to Egyptians so Egyptians don't believe it happens. The lawyer I know translated what I said to the guards at the bank and they all had a good chuckle and said "He'd be very smart if he could do that." Right. Like the same mechanics who keep black and white taxis working day after day for over 30 years with nothing but coathanger wire, tape, and a copy of the Koran holding them together couldn't also rig a white taxi meter.
So the lawyer gave HIS 20 pounds to the driver who went into the bank and gave him 10 in change and I paid him back. But THEN I got a little lecture about how if I think the driver is cheating me, I should tell him right away (again with the whole watch the meter and recalculate the fare every kilometer to make sure you're not being cheated on your whole ride to work scenario). This despite the fact that when you tell a driver his meter isn't working he says "it's fine, if you don't like the fare, talk to the government." The lawyer also told me that if I wanted the price to be negotiable, I could always take a black and white taxi, which I often do, but I pay them the same ten pounds I pay the white taxi. There's no "negotiating" about it because it is a very good price and much more than an Egyptian would pay for the same ride. Finally, despite the fact that the whole fight in the street had been in Arabic, including me telling the guards that the meter was too fast, that I take the same route every day and never have to pay more than ten pounds, etc. he also said "and you should speak a little Arabic." I know he just doesn't want to see me have problems in his country and he is saying these things because he wants the best for me, but right then I wanted to smoosh his adorable, carefully coiffed head!
Karmic justice - the driver, by being dishonest, cheated himself out of the feeling of getting a good tip. Because if he'd charged me the 7.5 pounds he was supposed to, and given my the correct change like he was supposed to, he would have driven off happily with ten pounds, freely and peacefully given. Instead, because he got my tab up to almost 11, he has the bad feeling of having almost got caught cheating, on top of the bad feeling of, in his mind, having been cheated out of that one pound he didn't earn in the first place.
Angry angry angry.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Friday, March 12, 2010
Garbage, snot, and shopping.
The garbage man just came to the door. We are supposed to either pay our doorman (actually a family of teenagers headed by what appears to be a single mom) or pay the zabaleen, the very poor, very old men who sweep the garbage from the streets and take it away. We aren’t supposed to have to pay both and we’ve been paying the door-family but I just can’t bring myself to tell the garbage man. The zabaleen are the closest thing Cairo has to a recycling/waste management system, as they pick through the garbage by hand and find every item with a potential use or value. The organic garbage used to be fed to pigs but last year the authorities killed all the pigs out of fear of swine flu. Pigs are unclean in Islam and in a country without healthcare for the poor, swine flu created quite a bit of paranoia that the government resolved by convincing people that the pigs were the source of the danger. Kill the pigs and the flu goes away. Unfortunately, now organic trash goes with the leftover inorganic trash (the stuff with no use or value to the zabaleen) to the outskirts of Cairo where the very, very poor live in plastic villages made out of tarps and garbage and stink. We pay the man who came to my door ten pounds ($2) per month. I will keep paying him because I can’t tell him I’m already paying someone else. What’s $2 a month to me?
I was hanging out my laundry the other night when I heard a short, loud whooshing noise in the dark above me and to my right. It happened again and again and I felt a little cloud of dampness on my cheek. My upstairs neighbor was blowing his nose farmer’s style off his balcony! “Hey!” I yelled. “SNOOSH” came again. I stepped back a little out of range and yelled again. “HEY!” “Oh!” came the startled reply (he didn’t know he had an audience). “Sorry. Sorry.” He said twice and then hurriedly stepped back to what was apparently an apartment bereft of Kleenex, toilet paper, paper towels and rags of all types. In the morning, I noticed that although his balcony was set off to the right of mine and that therefore my newly hung laundry missed the brunt of the snot shower but the apartment below me has a balcony that lines up perfectly with Mr. Snotty McSnotfest upstairs. And the woman who lives downstairs had her laundry out too!
The constant stress of living in Cairo is having a surprising effect on my health. I’ve lost around twenty-five pounds. Unfortunately, I’m still too big to wear most off the rack clothes at the mall but I am now a little too small to buy off the rack in the XXL shops either. Which means I go naked most of the time. No. Kidding. I still go to the mall, it just takes me forever to find clothes. I had a particularly Egyptian shopping experience last weekend when my roommate and I walked into a store on our way to H&M (the only H&M in Egypt is more expensive even than in Europe, but the clothes don’t have weird frills, sequins, mirrored buttons, build in “bodies” (these are skin-tight long-sleeved shirts women wear under what would otherwise be Vegas showgirl outfits to make them acceptable to wear out and about), or any other Egypt-fashionable accessories).
A young employee who obviously works on commission saw two foreigners stroll in and rushed over to help us, which meant demanding our size whenever we paused to look at an item and then looking through each one on the rack until he either found our size or didn’t. Basically what we would do if we were permitted to shop on our own. I was looking for basic dress shirts, a surprisingly elusive target, and extra frustrating since most of the men’s shirts here look like women’s shirts. They’re often pink or lavender, slightly tailored in at the waist and just generally seem to be rubbing it in that there are no women’s dress shirts that don’t seem to come complete with gills or lizard-like ribbed collars. Anyway, I digress. So I pause in front of a white, collared button-down shirt with black pinstripes, the only flaw of which was spherical shiny black buttons, that I could get my tailor to replace. The boy asked what my size was and I told him 48. His eyes went wide like he didn’t even know sizes went up that high. “No, no 48,” he said, without even checking through the rack. Then, he sort of roused himself from his shock and thumbed unenthusiastically through the few shirts. “No 48,” he said again, “44.” He actually made a counter-offer! Like we were going to negotiate about what size shirt I wear and inevitably compromise on 46. If only my pot belly would go along with the plan, we (my belly and I) could have made a killer deal!
I was hanging out my laundry the other night when I heard a short, loud whooshing noise in the dark above me and to my right. It happened again and again and I felt a little cloud of dampness on my cheek. My upstairs neighbor was blowing his nose farmer’s style off his balcony! “Hey!” I yelled. “SNOOSH” came again. I stepped back a little out of range and yelled again. “HEY!” “Oh!” came the startled reply (he didn’t know he had an audience). “Sorry. Sorry.” He said twice and then hurriedly stepped back to what was apparently an apartment bereft of Kleenex, toilet paper, paper towels and rags of all types. In the morning, I noticed that although his balcony was set off to the right of mine and that therefore my newly hung laundry missed the brunt of the snot shower but the apartment below me has a balcony that lines up perfectly with Mr. Snotty McSnotfest upstairs. And the woman who lives downstairs had her laundry out too!
The constant stress of living in Cairo is having a surprising effect on my health. I’ve lost around twenty-five pounds. Unfortunately, I’m still too big to wear most off the rack clothes at the mall but I am now a little too small to buy off the rack in the XXL shops either. Which means I go naked most of the time. No. Kidding. I still go to the mall, it just takes me forever to find clothes. I had a particularly Egyptian shopping experience last weekend when my roommate and I walked into a store on our way to H&M (the only H&M in Egypt is more expensive even than in Europe, but the clothes don’t have weird frills, sequins, mirrored buttons, build in “bodies” (these are skin-tight long-sleeved shirts women wear under what would otherwise be Vegas showgirl outfits to make them acceptable to wear out and about), or any other Egypt-fashionable accessories).
A young employee who obviously works on commission saw two foreigners stroll in and rushed over to help us, which meant demanding our size whenever we paused to look at an item and then looking through each one on the rack until he either found our size or didn’t. Basically what we would do if we were permitted to shop on our own. I was looking for basic dress shirts, a surprisingly elusive target, and extra frustrating since most of the men’s shirts here look like women’s shirts. They’re often pink or lavender, slightly tailored in at the waist and just generally seem to be rubbing it in that there are no women’s dress shirts that don’t seem to come complete with gills or lizard-like ribbed collars. Anyway, I digress. So I pause in front of a white, collared button-down shirt with black pinstripes, the only flaw of which was spherical shiny black buttons, that I could get my tailor to replace. The boy asked what my size was and I told him 48. His eyes went wide like he didn’t even know sizes went up that high. “No, no 48,” he said, without even checking through the rack. Then, he sort of roused himself from his shock and thumbed unenthusiastically through the few shirts. “No 48,” he said again, “44.” He actually made a counter-offer! Like we were going to negotiate about what size shirt I wear and inevitably compromise on 46. If only my pot belly would go along with the plan, we (my belly and I) could have made a killer deal!
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