Friday night. After 10 or so hours of coding automated xml edits and user authentication, I like to unwind with some nice taxi-driver hijinks. Unfortunately, I can’t just flag down a cab and ask the driver to rip me off or spout his nutty philoso-religious views and move on, so I generally have to manufacture and excuse to actually go somewhere. With that in mind, I met up with Amy, Carrie, and Carrie’s friend Ben. Ben is another American journalist who’s taking a little vacation in Beirut from his regular post in Baghdad. I find this kind of humorous.
I don’t remember if Amy or I covered this before, so I’m going to give a little recap on how cabs work in Beirut. You can try to catch a service taxi (pronounced servees), which entails flagging down a cab and saying, for instance, “service Gemmayze?” or wherever you’re going. They’ll either wave you in or keep driving. It costs a flat fee of 1000 LL/person (~$0.60) and the route is generally very circuitous on account of the fact that the driver picks up other passengers. There are variations on this, like the “double-service” (2000 LL/person), for destinations that the driver feels are a little bit off his beat. Since there were four of us, however, we opted for a regular taxi service. This basically entails paying 5000 LL (~$3.30) to go more-or-less anywhere within the city-limits. Many cars run service or taxi.
Since there were 4 of us, we took a regular taxi to Gemmayze. It’s about a 7-minute ride and indisputably within the 5000 LL radius of Hamra. However, on the way over we committed the dual crimes of being American/European-looking and perhaps saying to one another “Now where is this place again?” When we arrived at our destination, the driver handed me back our 5000 and said, “Hamra to Gemmayze is 10000. Ask anybody.” You know, I was tempted ask anybody because I’m sure anybody would have said, “Only if you’re a fool.” My companions just laughed it off and walked away, which was the smart thing to do. I felt that I had to stick around and make it clear to him that not only was I not going to pay double, that I knew he was ripping me off. In the end, I just walked away in a gray mood.
It’s one thing to hustle a little. If he had said to himself “Hey these look like stupid tourists and I’m going to see if I can fleece them for 10000” that’s one thing. But a the point where we balked, the honorable thing to do would be to accept the hkamses ailef and find some other sucker. To say, “No. It’s double. Ask anyone.” and then feign indignance isn’t hustling, it’s lying.
So, we met up with some new friends of Ben’s at a place called Layla. We’d been there once or twice before and it’s a cool joint…cozy, inexpensive, etc. I have to confess though, between working all day, the cab experience, and the genre-defying fusion-jazz-techno, I had a hard time hitting my stride. The rest of the gang seemed kind of tired too, so we ended up calling it an early night.
It was just the two of us on the return journey, so we hailed a service. Once we got in, he asked very specifically about where we were going I was worried he was going to charge us taxi fare. Those worries diminished to nothing as he began to unleash his particular personal magic on us. We drove by some women from the Gulf States (i.e. fully covered in black veils, etc) and he pantomimed spitting at them and said, “Ugh. Arabians. They look like ninjas, no?” He then turned to us and said, “You’re Christian, not Islam?” To this, you kind of have to say yes, because it’s true at least in the spirit of the context of the question.1 He began to go off, perhaps %20 intelligibly and %0 comprehensibly, about the various perversities of Muslims. He cited a man he new that had 4 wives and 80 children. At first we thought he said 18, but he reiterated “No, zero-eight, zero-eight.”2 At one point he was fervently asking if we understood that Jesus was the “shadow of god”.3 All of this was interspersed with frequent and unprovoked woops and whistles. It was quite a ride, but in the end he dropped us off a block away from our door, only charged us 2000 LL, and was more than happy to break a 10000 LL note (another popular taxi-driver hustle is the “I don’t have change” routine).
Though I worked all day Saturday as well, I didn’t feel a need to similarly “unwind” so Amy and I stayed home and watched TV.
As a coda, I’d like to mention the fact that Lebanese in general and Christian Lebanese in particular very much pride themselves on being of Phoenician and not Arab decent. Just another brick in the wall. Amy was actually making kind of a joke when she talked about “Arabs in the Middle East embracing GW“.
footnotes:
1 Apparently earlier in the night–i.e. before I met up with the gang–a waiter was disconcerted by the fact that Carrie wasn’t drinking alcohol and asked, “But you’re Christian, no?”
2 In arabic, numbers are written left-to-right, largest-to-smallest place value, just as in French or English or whatever. However, since arabic is read right-to-left, conceptually numbers are read smallest-to-largest place value. For example, 51964 would be written 
but would read as 4-1-9-6-5. You dig? So it makes perfect sense for the cabbie to say “80…0-8”.
3 I found his specific choice of words ironic. I’m currently reading Karen Armstrong’s history of Islam and in it she describes the various changes brought about by the Abassids when they overthrew the Ummayyads. One of the big changes was that the Islamic rulers went from portraying themselves as relatively ordinary people to styling themselves as “the Shadow of God on Earth.”