How Taking Taxis Improved My Spoken Arabic

When I was wandering around the Levant during my junior/senior/whatever year of college, I took a lot of taxis. In Beirut, I carried around a pack of expensive cigarettes and offered them to the cab driver if we were taking a long enough ride to warrant a cigarette. Although I can't condone smoking, it was an extremely easy way to make quick friends with the driver, and sometimes he counted that as payment, which always gave me the thrill of a Good Deal. They're going to smoke anyway. I may as well get a cheap cab ride out of it.


Without losing much time, most cabbies steered conversation to one's personal life, things one would not dare ask in an American taxi, questions which were endlessly amusing to answer, but sometimes crossed into the terrain of the Intrusive. If you speak Arabic, so much the better, because then you are instantly intriguing. It's excellent practice. Where are you from? (America/Canada) Are you married? (...yes.) Where is your husband? (He's in America/Canada/Portugal, he's coming to meet me here shortly.) Do you have babies? (...no.) Why NOT?! (...)


The best answer to "Why NOT?!" is to say that you've only been married 4 months. This usually calms them down because then they can't say that you're not TRYING, and it's possible that you could still have a baby within an acceptable time frame.


If a young single American doesn't say she's married (i.e. if she tells the truth) she will probably notice his ears perk up slightly. "Why aren't you married! It's better to be married!" To which she may respond, "...I don't want to be married yet," or, "I don't know anyone I want to marry," or, more amusingly, "I don't need a man to make my life complete." Any one of these may inspire an incredulous stare in the rearview mirror. And any one of them may inspire a proposal, which may be dismissed by something as simple as "I don't want to marry a Muslim," or, "I'm not interested," but more often was persistent. "I make good American husband!" many claimed earnestly. "It is PERMISSIBLE for a Muslim man to marry a Christian woman!" (...yeah, but it's maybe not permissible for the Christian woman to marry the Muslim man. What about that?) "You want to live here? I marry you, you stay here. It's beautiful." I once heard a despairing cabbie's woeful tale of converting to Islam in order to marry a Muslim woman, only to have her call off the engagement and leave him stuck with a religion he didn't really believe and couldn't legally denounce. His solution: marry me, move to America, forget about Islam. My solution: Tip him and get out of the cab.

After the first few proposals, I began wondering: what response did they really expect? Did these cab drivers (who were, I'm sure, friendly, hard-working, upstanding citizens) understand the absurdity of their suggestion? Did they think it was possible, or likely, that a single American girl would find love, or at least, a mutual admiration, with a cab driver in an Amman suburb and just decide, in the time it takes to drive up one of Amman's rocky hills, to change her previous plans, marry him, and stay there?

I guess people do that. I guess it's conceivable that one would be so taken with the city, so enamored of the jasmine wafting through the valleys, so flattered by the prospect of a sudden relationship with a dark man in a new country, that one would shrug off her previous life and transplant herself to foreign soil. Conceivable, but not very likely for a free and easy college-educated girl in her young 20s whose possessions fit in one large, wheeled duffle bag.

This is not an easy concept to explain in halting Arabic. I did my best. I'll never forget the words for "My husband is in another country right now," "No, I don't have babies," "I don't want to marry you," "You've got to be kidding," or "That's not important. I'll get out here."

So the moral of the story is that public transportation helps your vocabulary.