I Learned a New Word

Last night we headed out to visit a friend who had invited us for dinner.  We hailed a taxi and found a "new taxi" but with an old driver who wanted to negotiate a rate.  We did the usual song and dance including my "walk away" and settled on twenty pounds for the twelve pound trip.  I'm a generous tipper since I can't imagine a worse job than driving a hack in Cairo.

The driver was unusually courteous, moving the front passenger seat up so that Linda had room for her feet which also left no room for his empty water bottle.  He tossed that out the window onto the street in front of our apartment.

"Where from?  German?" he said.

"America," I replied.

"Obama," he exclaimed.

Well, I can do that too.  "Morsi!" I said.

"Morsi, ****!" he replied, using the Arabic word you would expect to hear when someone just discovered that they locked their keys inside the car. 

I always try to learn a few new words on each trip and a good vulgarism certainly may come in handy.

Our driver loved President Kennedy and, like most people of his age, very fondly remembered the Sadat era.

At the end of the trip I gave him the twenty-five pounds that we had argued over so hard at the start.