Shattered glass and angry cab drivers.

I could not have guessed yesterday morning—an inauspicious day begun with off-brand Rice Krispies and a v-necked sweater—that I would be covered in broken glass and shouting "I didn't do anything!" in a crowded Egyptian vegetable market by 3pm that afternoon. But then, life is always full of surprises.

I was supposed to meet my friend Nesma at her work in the Giza neighborhood—a busy, congested part of the city cut by two major streets, with shopping districts and neighborhoods tumbling off to either side. She had given me the address, and I had a rough idea of where it was. So I took the metro to the closest stop and planned to hail a cab from there.

The Faysal metro stop is a bit chaotic to get out of: a market place and a busy intersection are both crushed against the side of the building, leaving little room to navigate between banana vendors and oncoming traffic.

I stopped to buy a kilo of bananas, since Nesma and I would be joining her aunt for 'breakfast.' The man kept trying to give me the squished bananas and hassled me about giving me correct change. It was hot. Microbuses and tuktuks kept swerving uncomfortably close. 2 hours before the end of the day's fast and in the full sun, all of us were a little irritable.

Bananas stowed safely away in my purse, I began to hunt for a cab. In Cairo, 1 in every 3 cars seems to be a taxi, thanks to a recent government law that lets anyone with a spare car and some black and white paint hit the streets to earn some extra money. At the Faysal station, however, there were inexplicably few taxis coming by, and all of them were full. One free taxi driver wanted 40 pounds for the ride—10 times the fair price. I began to think about calling Nesma to cancel.

Finally, an empty taxi came by. I shouted out the address to the driver, who motioned me in. He unlocked the door for me. I opened it, sat inside, tucking my oversized purse safely beside me. I gingerly shut the door.
The moment the latch clicked, the entire window cracked and crumbled down shards of broken glass over me, the taxi floor, and the street outside. It was like a special effect in a movie—the sound of tinkling glass, and then an empty space where the window used to be.
"Well, that sucks," thought I, not believing for a moment that the breaking of the glass could possibly have anything to do with my gentle shutting of the door. I glanced at the driver. He seemed non-plussed. "Well, nothing we can do about it now," I thought to myself again, and proceeded to repeat the address I wanted to the driver.
He responded by calling me something—I'm not sure what, but undoubtedly something not to be translated in polite company. After crossing the intersection, he pulled over. I got out, said goodbye, and began walking away.
He caught up with me sometime near the dried dates stand, by now waving his arms and shouting loudly. Six or seven bystanders immediately came over to see what the matter was.

Now, it's a simple thing to know enough of a language to dig yourself into a whole, or stick your foot in your mouth (if you want to mix metaphors), but something else entirely to be able to talk your way out of trouble. In this, my Arabic had heretofore been untested. Luckily, the words didn't fail me—even it if did involve my rather inarticulate and repeated insistence that "I didn't do anything!" Prompted by the bystanders' questions, I was able to explain my case to their satisfaction. In the meantime, the taxi driver kept angrily punching numbers into his cellphone, as if to convince us that he was going to call someone to prove to me what was what. Who he could possibly call or what that was going to prove was a mystery to any of us.
Our street arbitrators, acting as Judge Judy and jury all in one, decided I didn't owe him any money, and forcibly separated us and made us walk in opposite directions.

I went inside the metro station, called Nesma, and told her that if she wanted to see me, she was going to have to come get me—I wasn't about to the pile of broken glass to flag down another cab. Minus a small shard of glass I discovered in my big toe walking to work this morning, I weathered my first street fight in Egypt just fine.