Best Taxi ride of my life!

So, you seriously NEVER know what you are going to get when you get into a taxi here.  It can range anywhere from downright boring, to frustrating, to annoying, to peaceful, etc.  Most of the time, I try to communicate a little.  Amanda and I joke that our tipping is directly proportional to the question, "Do you have a husband?"  If you ask, you get no tip.  If you don't ask, you get a tip (sometimes).  [Taxi tips are not necessary at all but sometimes if we like a particular driver we will tip].

Anyhow, so we eat dinner at none other than Shaddy's and get a taxi at about 6:30 to go home.  It started out as any other taxi would with him trying to charge us more than we should pay.  We tell him the price we will pay and get in. 

From then on out, he never stopped talking.  Not for a second.  Mostly in French.  Amanda doesn't understand French at all and I understand very little (two years in high school + three semesters in college = pas comprends).  This did not deter this taxi driver.  He is talking a hundred miles an hour about everything.  He wanted to spout off every American celebrity that he knew.  This ranged from Michael Jordan to Phil Collins to Michael Jackson.  Then he starts singing.  Everything.  He sang songs we didn't know; he made our names into a song; he started singing "This is the life for me"; and finally, the best was when he started singing Michael Jackson's "Black or White" [Shout out, OB!  I will always think of you when I hear this song].  He starts holding up a fake microphone and I chime in with him.  He wants to be a "grand artist" in this country and invites me to sing with him.  He shows us his newspaper, his spray of some sort, anything to keep the conversation going.  Amanda and I are just dying laughing.  At one point, he mentioned languages he knew/could read and he mentioned Arabic among others.  He is not paying attention to the rode at all.  The actual cab of the taxi is terrible..  everytime we hit a bump, we thought the back of the taxi was going to literally fall off.  It was awesome.

You ask if I got his telephone number?  Why, yes I did.  When we are having an off day, we will certainly be texting our friend the taxi driver for some good ole entertainment.  We also left him quite a tip because he didn't ask if we were married and he entertained us the entire way home.  We also left him a gift with our Father's message in Arabic :)

Best. Taxi. Ride. Ever.