Thursday, November 19, 2009

Hit & Run

Thought I would share an interesting night with you all.
The other night Jamie and I were headed to my soccer practice and we found a cab right when we walked out of our apartment. We thought we were lucky because we usually have to walk a little before we can get one. He was very nice and spoke decent English. Right away he needed to do a U-turn to go the opposite way. When he did this there were 2 men walking on the side of the road, he stopped in the middle of his turn because he could not go any further since the walkers were in the way. I remember thinking, “woah! We got close to them.” We waited a couple seconds as the men kept walking so we could complete the turn. When the driver thought they were ahead enough to keep going he accelerated and completed the turn. Okay 1 problem… the men were not out of the way enough yet. WE ENDED UP HITTING THE GUY ON THE OUTSIDE WITH OUR BUMPER! I was watching the whole thing and knew before it happened what we were about to do. The car bumper hit him in the back of the knees, which forced him to sit on the car a little until we stopped. Jamie and I were probably as wide-eyed as we could get! The taxi driver got out of the car, we then saw him showing them were the sidewalk was and how to use it. (yeh right, Jordan has the worst sidewalk system I have seen and no one uses it because there is no point). The guy who got hit was okay but very very mad. He seems to exchange some not nice words as they began to argue. Next thing we know the guy who got hit turns around and comes back swinging a white paint bucket over his head trying to hit the taxi driver in the head with it! The friend of the guy who got hit stopped him. The only thing better than a video of this would have been a video of us in the back seat saying, “what do we do!” I realized I had my cell phone clenched in my hand but, let’s be real, who was I going to call! Anyways they kept yelling at each other until every now and then someone would step and try to fight where the friend would step in and stop them. This went on for a while. Finally the friend pushed the guy who got hit to just walk away and leave, we thought, “okay its over.” NOPE! Taxi driver all the sudden runs down the hill after them! We knew this was our escape. We ran out of the taxi back to our apartment and up the stairs. Audry laughs so hard now when she thinks about us stumbling in out of breath telling her the story. Only a minute later we saw out the window the taxi driver came back to his car and looked for us and then drove away. We thought it was safe to try again, so back out we went. We saw him parked only down the street a little talking to a guy again so we ran the other way and took the long way down to hill to find a different taxi. It was the craziest thing ever. WHO HITS A WALKER!! Just is just one of our many experiences that will be etched in our minds forever :)
Kelley

3 comments:

  1. Classic...Jordanian taxi drivers yelling and doing things you never could've imagined! Can't wait for more stories.

    -Zach

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  2. this made my day....oh the taxi stories that you can only get by living in Jordan :)

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  3. Yep, taxi drivers know no bounds.

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    By the way, we saw on the news today that the King dissolved parliment again. Don't worry, this is actually kind of normal. The last time it happened was the day that we landed in Amman at the start of our project... can you image our suprise when we saw the newspaper on the airplane??? We thought we were heading into complete mayhem. Luckily, the only impact it had on us was that there were an extra few political rallies we chose to avoid as the new elections came rolling around.

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