craziest thing I’ve seen in Egypt

This happened just 15 minutes ago. I went with a friend to dinner in the city tonight. We were headed back home, and agreed with the taxi driver’s suggestion to take the Ring Road instead of the Nile corniche, due to heavy congestion on the latter.

There was a bizarrely intense auto duel on the Ring Road between a white taxi and a black Honda. Both were doing well over 100 miles per hour (over 160 km/hour), weaving in and out of heavy traffic and almost looking as if they were trying to sideswipe each other.

That was the worst traffic joust I’ve ever seen, but it gets much worse.

We got onto the exit ramp for the Autostrad into Ma’adi, the southern suburb of Cairo. Our progress was blocked because the black Honda had simply stopped on the exit ramp. Luckily (due to what comes next) there was a white pickup truck between the black car and us.

The white taxi stopped insanely on the Ring Road itself, a little bit behind us.

My friend was urging our taxi driver with great vehemence to get out of there, and I didn’t understand why, but it’s because she saw that the driver of the black car had a gun pointed out the window in the general direction of the jousting taxi driver, apparently waiting for him.

That taxi driver, the one involved in the incident (not ours) was about 30 years old with a moustache. He just stood by his taxi, not moving. Finally, the driver of the black car fired at him. He didn’t hit him, but there were hundreds of cars speeding by, and it will be a miracle if the bullet didn’t hit someone, or at least a car.

The driver of the black Honda went down the exit ramp ahead of us and turned off on the first dark side street. We didn’t get the license number, though I tried. The taxi driver got back in his taxi and drove away.

It was a bad note on which to end the evening. Before that, I was planning to make a post about how excited people are getting about the election here. I’ll still make that post, just not for awhile.

And in all fairness, I saw someone fire a lot more shots than that in front of my apartment in Chicago.