Horse in the road; bitch in the car.

I ride a bus to and from work every day. In retrospect, I’m surprised that tales from the back of the bus haven’t made their way to my blog sooner. Its my university’s version of the water cooler, shade tree mechanic, happy hour pub all rolled into one (minus any possible form of refreshment; no food or drinks allowed). On the bus, I rub elbows with folks from all over the Uni, all three schools, multiple departments and some of the senior administrators. I learn things on the bus, both about life in Cairo (best restaurants, shops, social events), AUC news (new campus building stage, controversies, firings and hirings, the dirt on everyone). Its our institutional memory, social networking, oral tradition and urban legend reservoir all wrapped into one.

In short, for a mere three Egyptian pounds($.50) per trip, its cheap, as they say, at half the price.

Last Wednesday, may go down in the record book as my most memorable bus ride ever. Not only was it great for mere entertainment value, but it crystallized in my mind all of the things about Egypt, both rotten and remarkable. And to think, it only cost me fifty cents.

Ola, who works in some weird bureaucratic office called iPART (I think they’re the long term planners of the university), lives on a narrow street near the corniche in Maadi. Sometimes, she’s feeling rugged and the bus drops her off on the corner. Other days, she insists on being taken to her doorstep. She’s the first person dropped off in the afternoon, and those of us in the back of the bus are usually way too preoccupied with our own cleverness to notice what’s going on outside the bus.

Well, last Thursday, what was going on was that a cart, loaded with gravel and pulled by a handsome horse (chestnut brown, extremely healthy), was coming down this narrow, one-lane street towards us. We were too far down the block to back up so, as is quite typical in Cairo, our driver blazed on ahead, signaling to the cart that he had to pull off to the side. The cart obliged, he found an empty parking space on our right and pulled into it, the blinkered horse casually munching on a bucket of grass while our bus pulled past him. Or at least attempted to pull past him. As we had been patiently waiting for the horse to maneuver into its spot, a woman in a beat up, but relatively late model Peugeot 407 zoomed up and tried to sneak into the same spot as the horse. Apparently, she had been talking on her mobile, and hadn’t noticed the impasse looming. Unfortunately, the cart took up most of the space. Her car could only get about halfway in. Our bus was therefore unable to move forward, and the cart was effectively blocked in.

Now, up till this point, nothing that out of the ordinary had occurred. This was typical Cairo driving behavior and certainly hadn’t garnered much attention from our contingent in the back of the bus. We had dimly been aware of the horse, had heard our driver shouting a little at the car in front, but what got our attention was when our driver shut his engine off completely.

Apparently, after the lady refused to back up, even after he told her that she was the one responsible, his inestimable opinion was that making a defiant gesture of absolute firmness would best resolve the situation.

The lady, herself a deft practitioner in the dark art of back alley driver negotiations, and at an apparent tactical advantage over the bus driver as being the only one really capable of resolving the situation, instead chose to engage the emergency brake, exit the car through passenger side (the bus was blocking the driver’s door), set the car alarm, and calmly, ignoring the speechless but hostile stares of our now thoroughly engage bus denizens, picked her way through the debris on the side of the street and disappeared into a building. The horse, meanwhile, continued to enjoy his snack and break, but was the only creature on the street not entirely aghast at this situation.

Fifteen minutes later, let me repeat myself, fifteen minutes later, during which time we all sat silently, trying to figure out what to do, the neighborhood roused a shopkeeper from his stalled and persuaded him to moved his 1979 orange Mercedes 200E from the right hand side of the street, thus allowing our bus to restart its engine, swerve to the right of the Peugeot (where the bus driver found the restraint not to side swipe it as we passed remains a mystery to me) and we continued home. I didn’t get to see what happened to the horse, but I presume he, too, continued his appointed rounds.

As I mentioned before, this story contains so many elements of my life in Cairo that it practically beggars my ability to expound upon them all. And, since, I’ve almost used up my self-imposed 1000 word post limit, I’ll leave that up to my faithful readership to fill in. Look forward to more episodes from the back of the bus…