What is it with these cab drivers? We have a taxi "casa" (as I call it) a few doors down from our house. Most of the day I can walk down there and find a bunch of cabbies standing around watching one guy get his shoes shined. I've been taking cabs more often because I have to go into LP to teach my English classes, and the commute has given me the opportunity to become somewhat of an expert on the various types of taxi drivers. Here are my favorites.
The Entrepreneur: He wears dress pants and a button-down shirt. He often receives phone calls while driving and signals his other taxi-buddies with a toot of the horn. The entrepreneur is the only one who has seat belts readily available to passengers in the front and the back seats.
Christmas-and-Easter driver: This driver isn't particularly religious. He has the obligatory cross hanging from his rear-view mirror, but unlike the Doomsday-is-around-the-next-corner- and-I'll-get-you-there-in-a-jiffy driver, he doesn't cross himself at every treacherous turn and he only pauses (instead of stopping, crossing himself, kissing his hand, and saying Amen for making it out of the city) at the shrine at the bottom of the hill on the way to the suburbs.
Our taxi casa on a slow day.The orange wall is our house.
Arthur: Remember that movie about that crazy drunken British guy, Arthur, played by Dudley Moore? My most recent cab driver didn't look like him (as far as I could tell. I only saw the back of his head), but he certainly drove like a drunkard. I got a little nervous when he didn't cross himself or pause at the shrine. He blew right through it like a bat outta hell. Ironically, a bat out of hell should cross himself for being such a lucky guy... Anyway, there was a lot of mid-day traffic because people go home for lunch for two-hours. Apparently, Arthur wanted to get home, too. He decided to go up and over the curb not realizing he was driving an old 4-door Toyota. Instead of going up and over we kind of went straight into the curb. For days I had achy joints and a headache.
Country Mouse: I swear, there is a whole army of taxi drivers who have just moved to LP. On more than one occasion I have had a taxi driver ask another one for directions to my destination (I'm not much help considering I barely know my derecha from my izquierda). Believe me, everyone knows where I am going by just looking at me. It is like being in DC and telling a cab driver you'd like to see Pennsylvania Avenue and having the cabbie say, "Hey lady, could you be a little more specific?"
The Culturally Sensitive driver: This driver is not unique to SA. We encountered them across Turkey and a couple in Madagascar. In other countries they play Hotel California as loud as possible, but here the Culturally Sensitive driver plays a wide-variety of boy-band music a la Backstreet Boys and 98 Degrees.
Despite these intricacies, they all seem to have one thing in common: They all fall into the category of Sorry-I-don't-have-any-change-Gringo.
