I don’t like taking taxis by myself.  If I can avoid taking a taxi solo, I will.  As a traveler, though, taking taxis, alone or accompanied, is unavoidable.  I dislike taking taxis because, even though I hate people, there’s something about me that seems to encourage unpleasant (for me) conversations, more so than about others, because my friends and colleagues don’t have the same experiences in taxis that I have.

Several times when I lived in DC, before I started driving myself to the airport for business trips to avoid these conversations, I would get asked about my boyfriend.  I get that I’m more sensitive than most when it comes to safety (too many episodes of “Criminal Minds”), but I’m so uncomfortable with the idea that a perfect stranger who knows where I live and in whose moving car I’m trapped also wants to know my romantic status.  I made up a boyfriend, and he happened not to be in town to pick me up from the airport because he was in the Navy.  Eventually, that got changed to the Marines.  And then he became a sniper in the Marines.

Another time in DC, the cabbie was listening to NPR,

and something the broadcaster said sent the cabbie into a long rant about drugs.  His position was that the CIA created crack to keep African-Americans in poverty.  At the same time, he believed that all other drugs, especially marijuana, should be legal and free to use whenever.  I believe in personal liberty, and that what you do at home is your business, but I had a flash that this driver considered his taxi his home, and so I snuck my seatbelt on and started to pray while being grateful that it wasn’t rush hour.  Answering in monosyllables didn’t help. At first he thought I agreed with him, which gave him an opportunity to preach to the choir.  When he figured out I disagreed with him, he started lecturing me and offering evidence of the correctness of his theory until he dropped me off at my destination.

The “best” conversation I had with a DC taxi driver, though, was about Tiger Woods shortly after the news came out that he cheated on his wife.  The radio announcer was summarizing the day’s news, and the driver said that Tiger had made only a small mistake and that the driver didn’t understand the fuss.  I made the mistake of disagreeing with him.  This ensued:

Taxi driver: You’re not a forgiving person.

CC: I am a forgiving person.

Taxi driver: But you wouldn’t forgive Tiger’s one mistake.

CC: I would forgive shrinking my clothes in the dryer. THAT’s a mistake. What Tiger did is not “one mistake.”

Taxi driver: Are you married?

CC: No.

Taxi driver: That’s why.

CC: I’m ok with that.

These experiences are not limited to taxi drivers in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.  In San Francisco, I had a taxi driver tell me for 20 minutes how he wasn’t a taxi driver but a provider of superior service.  Then he missed the exit for the airport, and I had to direct him on the back roads there.  In Dallas, in the course of what started as a normal conversation about how Dallas has grown, my taxi driver decided to tell me that he knew where all the brothels in the DFW metroplex are.  In London, my cabbie railed at me for the geographical ignorance of Americans.  I took the blame for my compatriots not being able to name more than three cities in England.  When I named five (London, Southampton, Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham), he got even madder because I couldn’t tell him where they were.

In Abu Dhabi, I got into an actual fight with a taxi driver.  My parents, sister, aunt, two cousins, and I went to tour the Grand Mosque, which is about halfway to the airport in a section of the city that doesn’t see a lot of pedestrian traffic.  This means that if you want to get back to the downtown area, where most of the malls and tourist hotels are (and where my parents’ flat is), you have to pay for a taxi to wait for you (expensive), you have to call the central dispatch (unreliable), or you take one of the taxis waiting in the parking lot.

The problem with taking one of the taxis in the parking lot is that the cabbies know that you are stuck.  And so, despite the fact that the law of the land dictates that taxis may only charge what’s on the meter, the drivers, who are all poor citizens from other countries trying to support their families back home, try to make a few extra dirhams and charge a flat fee, which leans toward highway robbery.

I am a compulsive reader.  I am the target of the ads that you find in public restroom stalls.  I also read all of the notices that the authorities put in the back of taxis, which is how I know that it’s against the law to charge anything but the amount on the meter for fare.  So when one of the taxi drivers at the Grand Mosque tried to rip us off on the fare, I refused and approached another driver.  Big mistake.  Turns out the first guy was their ringleader and started shouting at me and calling me names in his mother tongue and then shouted at the other cabbies not to take us.  We found two who would, much to the ringleader’s fury.  Our taxi driver turned on his meter (I checked – twice), and I think he called a friend to tell him about the crazy, woman, American tourist who got into a shouting match in public with his colleague.

The reason I think he was telling his friend about us is that my mother called during the ride and said that her taxi driver was trying to hide the meter while he negotiated a higher fare.  That sent me around the bend again.  And so I told her that regardless of what he did to the price on the meter, that her fare would be the number of meters driven, divided by 750, plus 3.  She wrote it down.  Her taxi driver is also not my biggest fan.  My taxi driver stopped talking while I spoke to my mother, then seemed to report what I said in Arabic, using the same emphasis and cadence I did.  Then he laughed.  He also gave us his phone number and told us to call him if we ever needed a taxi.

I concede that I started the fight in Abu Dhabi.  I can’t explain the interactions everywhere else, and these are just the tip of the iceberg.  I’ve tried being silent, I’ve tried wearing my fiercest bitch face, I’ve tried making sure I’m on the phone – this stuff keeps happening.  And that is why I always rent a car whenever possible and I love my GPS.