Cairo Champion

It's a hot, polluted day here in Cairo — the Black Smoke is in town, its that time of the year when the farmers, factories and garbage guys burn everything in their possession, from the stubble from rice and cotton harvests, to tyres. The taxi ride home is taking especially long today — traffic here in Cairo is so unpredictable. There's no certain time or street where you know there wont be traffic.

And everyone is fasting. It's been 28 days since Ramadan started and as it gets closer to iftar time, tempers are peaking, patience is wearing thin everywhere. Except, it seems, in the case of my taxi driver:

1) While on the road, cars start moving and very promptly, our taxi bumps into the pickup truck in front. It's the other guys fault mind you, he shouldn't have stopped as suddenly as he did. Minor bump but you hear my taxi's headlights get smashed. My cabbie gets out, and instead of smashing the doofus's head in (as we were secretly hoping he would) he hardly says a word to the guy, merely examines his headlights, picks up the broken glass from the road, gets back into his seat and drives off.

2) Fast forward to 25 minutes later. Stuck in traffic near Midan Tahrir, we're rounding a corner, and some loser, with painfully slow precision, gloriously scrapes the side of my taxi (My poor taxi driver, it just wasn't his day). The taxi halts to a stop. The other guy drives off. My cabbie examines the scrape, no angry mutterings, no flailing fists in the air, only — and would you believe this — only a smile at a passing taxi, when his colleague on the road makes a comment about the scraping.

After getting his car screwed TWICE in half an hour, this guy smiles.

Now that's what I call a Cairo Champion.

Note: Before feeling alarmed at the extreme laxness of handling traffic mishaps, readers should be aware that most vehicles (in particular, taxis) on Cairo roads are so beat-up and ancient that a scratch and a bump here and there doesn't really make much difference to the overall exterior of most cars.