I am beginning to believe that there is no one more interesting than a Taxi Driver.
In Richmond, VA I met Mohammed. Mohammed is from Morocco and loooooves him some Pop music. Not Britney Spears though, I asked. Mohammed loves Nickleback. A lot. He also keep thousands of dollars (I think) in change in a cooler between the driver’s and passenger’s seat in his mini van. Mohammed doesn’t own this particular taxi company but we were 100% in obtaining him as our driver for our entire stay in Richmond, I guess you could call us lucky. Mohammed visits Morocco once a year. He is married to an American woman from South Carolina and together they have a son. Neither his wife or his son visit Morocco with him. His wife hates to fly, but he offers to buy her a ticket each time he plans a vacation. She refuses to go but takes the plane ticket money and goes shopping. He mentioned that he likes to have a lot of fun in Morocco. I applauded his love of fun and asked if it made him sad that his family did not come with him, he said, “What happens in Morocco, stays in Morocco.” I swear that is the slogan for a certain sin city in the good ol’ U.S.A…but Mohammed speaks the truth, and I believe him. Stay classy Mohammed, stay classy my friend.
Then there was Mohammed II. Strangely enough, also from Morocco. I asked him if he had relatives named Mohammed in Richmond, he doesn’t. Well, MII is a shuttle driver outside of D.C. Really nice man. As HDC and I get into the shuttle he starts complaining about how the driving laws have changed. I drive for a living so I questioned him. “You used to be able to drink and drive all the time, now you can’t.” That was his complaint. The man who was currently driving me. The man who drives other people around (hopefully safely) for a living. Awesome. I told him that it was wildly inappropriate to drink and drive because there are shuttles (i.e. what we were in), taxis, buses and the metro which take you everywhere in D.C. He explained to me that he used to do it all the time, until the cops started cracking down on the drunk drivers. One night MII was sober and got pulled over, the first thing he said to the PoPo was “Of all the nights I’ve been drunk you pull me over when I’m sober.” Gotta love an honest man. The last night MII was my shuttle driver he told Texas that I was what the French call “poissant” ( I couldn’t find the actual spelling of the word on the good ol’ internet but that’s what it sounded like, apparently it is some kind of slang phrase). Poissant means crazy woman. Thanks, MII, it was a pleasure.
After arriving in D.C. I landed a taxi driver named Walter. Walter loves sports, but doesn’t watch them on T.V., although for a split second he told me that he was an Oakland Raiders coach. Let’s keep in mind he is a Taxi Driver in Washington D.C. He later retracted that statement and decided to be a golf coach for whippersnappers, which I totally believe and appreciate because I use the word whippersnapper all the time. We had a lovely chat about the time he started talking like Fog Horn Leg Horn to get the whippersnapper’s attention. As I exited the cab he said, “Who would have thought that two people who both use the word whisppernapper would be in the same cab together?” It was a pure miracle, Walter.
There was also the cab driver in Seattle that said I looked like Paris Hilton after he told my very Italian, very white coworker that she looked like Beyonce.
Case(s) and point…aren’t these guys the most interesting people in the world? And to think all of this information was divulged in a less than 15 minute cab ride.
Advice: Sit in the front seat and control the conversation…you never know what will happen. But it will be GREAT.
I'll think about that tomorrow. 