A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, we were on vacation in Egypt with my wife. In Hurghada, there was (and perhaps still is) a particular type of scam where a minibus driver, noticing that you are the only ones left in the vehicle, takes you to a remote place, supposedly to cut the route short. He stops there and starts demanding that this is not a minibus but a taxi, and that the fare is not the few coins you paid, but 10 dollars per kilometer, insisting he won’t go any further until you pay up.
The best way to deal with such fraudsters was to insist on the involvement of the tourist police, which, in Egypt, unlike in Turkey, always stands on the side of the tourist (and rightly so).
In general, my wife and I found ourselves in a situation like that. It was around 11 PM, there was no one on the streets, and it all started… I insisted on calling the police, and while I was calculating my next move, the driver called on her mobile, and out of the bushes (okay, he arrived on a motorcycle in 5 minutes) came a police officer, and they both started to pressure us. My requests to specifically call the tourist police were ignored, and the conversation quickly turned emotional.
What am I doing? I stop speaking in English and start speaking in Russian, passionately accompanying my speech with gestures and facial expressions. I talk continuously, gesture continuously, and it’s clear that I know what I’m saying and what I’ll say a second later, and I don’t hesitate for words at all; I’m clearly getting myself worked up. The Egyptian guys interrupt me, saying it was their fault, that they made a mistake, and they take us to where we were actually headed. It seems like the end of the story, but now I just need to figure out why they suddenly became so accommodating.
Oh, I forgot to tell you that I didn’t explain to them how wrong they were; instead, I recited “Poems about the Soviet Passport” by V. Mayakovsky, using gestures and facial expressions to show how I would “gnaw out bureaucracy like a wolf,” “any piece of paper, but this one…,” “through the long row of compartments and cabins,” and, of course, muttering through my teeth: “takes it like a bomb, takes it like a hedgehog, takes it like a double-edged razor…”
Apparently, the Egyptians’ reaction was also influenced by the expression on my wife’s face, which was one of shock at this declamation. She stood there with her mouth open, staring at me in disbelief, unable to comprehend what was happening.