Sand in my cab
Jun. 15th, 2008 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyringI’ve recently bought a new laptop. My iPhone is so cool that I’ve been looking at Apple products with fresh eyes, and the MacBook Air was too elegant not to buy to replace my cranky Vista machine.
A chunk of money, but I’m having so much fun with my new Mac that I don’t care. This website is one of the results.
However, the process of switching from PC to Mac is not without problems. Syncing my iPhone to a different iTunes lost me all my playlists. Granted, I can set up fresh ones quickly, but for just a night I was left without. I chose random shuffle on all songs and for the rest of the night I was wondering what track would play next. Rocky Horror Picture Show or Locattelli. German kinder songs or Bill Haley.
A great conversation starter, though, and when “Time Warp” came up on the shuffle on the way to Queanbeyan, it started a wonderful conversation with a chap just off the bus from Sydney on cult classics and Seventies culture. My cab ride must have cost him twice the Sydney bus fare, but my passenger still gave me a generous tip at the end of the ride, when I dropped him outside the kebab shop.
If I’m not playing a music video (and I’m not called the Abba Cabbie for nothing, you know), then I’ll have a slideshow of my travel photographs running on the iPhone while the shuffle picks the music. Passengers will sit and watch this, and sometimes a photograph will spark a discussion. “Geez, that bear’s been around!” is a typical comment, because a lot of the photographs show RingBear posed in front of the Eiffel Tower, amongst a field of Texas bluebonnets, looking down on Hong Kong, sitting on the dock of the bay, Alcatraz in the background...
I got to talking about Paris one night, with a young lady public servant, and we enthused about travel for a while. I’m getting to have some knowledge about the world and its people, but I trust that I’m not turning into a bore.
“Have you been there?” she asked, after a slide showed a ‘Welcome to Egypt’ sign, with RingBear relaxing in the last rays of the African sun.
“Just for a few minutes in Port Said,” I said, “And I spent a day in Sharm El Sheik, but that hardly counts.”
“I just asked, because I’ve just come back from Egypt and Morocco. Last week, I was in the Sahara, living with a nomad family.”
My jaw dropped open. Paris and Washington are all very fine, but small potatoes compared to this. And just last week!
She went on to tell me how she and her mother had gone on a tour through North Africa, and she had liked Morocco so much that after seeing her mother onto a plane home, she had gone back into the desert for a longer and deeper experience. She described the empty landscape, the unworldly evenings out in the open, the opportunities for personal reflection so far away from the noise and distractions of civilisation.
And the people of the desert. “I started teaching the children the alphabet,” she said, “Sitting down with them, drawing the shapes of the letters and saying their names. And after a while, I’d glance up to see the camel herdsmen standing behind me, looking over my shoulder. By the end of the morning, they were sitting down with the children.”
I was charmed. Here was the Sahara floating into my midnight cab, the sights and sands drifting in and settling over the curves of the dashboard. Northbourne Avenue turned into a dusty track, the moonlight sculpting the dunes into frozen waves of flowing art.
And there was aso Canberra dropped into the middle of the Sahara, an al fresco classroom run by a public servant on holiday.
What a wide, wonderful world we live in. Never question why I drive a cab. It’s for the travel.
We pulled up in a tree-lined street, the fallen leaves thick in the grass, and I watched her slender figure vanish through the shrubs in the front garden. I could think of another reason why nomadic camel herders would want to spend time in the company of a delightful young woman. Everything about her would have been doubly entrancing and exotic to them, and they would listen to her foreign voice as she told of kangaroos and meat pies, the stars upside down and the golden wattle in the springtime.
No, it’s not the travel. It’s the people who make my job a delight.
I sighed happily, pushed a few buttons on my iPod, and Dido’s sweet voice filled my taxi:
I could get on a plane and fly away
From the road where the cars never stop going through the night
To a life where I can watch the sun set and take my time, take all our time.
I've still got sand in my shoes and I can't shake the thought of you
I should get on, forget you but why would I want to...
A chunk of money, but I’m having so much fun with my new Mac that I don’t care. This website is one of the results.
However, the process of switching from PC to Mac is not without problems. Syncing my iPhone to a different iTunes lost me all my playlists. Granted, I can set up fresh ones quickly, but for just a night I was left without. I chose random shuffle on all songs and for the rest of the night I was wondering what track would play next. Rocky Horror Picture Show or Locattelli. German kinder songs or Bill Haley.
A great conversation starter, though, and when “Time Warp” came up on the shuffle on the way to Queanbeyan, it started a wonderful conversation with a chap just off the bus from Sydney on cult classics and Seventies culture. My cab ride must have cost him twice the Sydney bus fare, but my passenger still gave me a generous tip at the end of the ride, when I dropped him outside the kebab shop.
If I’m not playing a music video (and I’m not called the Abba Cabbie for nothing, you know), then I’ll have a slideshow of my travel photographs running on the iPhone while the shuffle picks the music. Passengers will sit and watch this, and sometimes a photograph will spark a discussion. “Geez, that bear’s been around!” is a typical comment, because a lot of the photographs show RingBear posed in front of the Eiffel Tower, amongst a field of Texas bluebonnets, looking down on Hong Kong, sitting on the dock of the bay, Alcatraz in the background...
I got to talking about Paris one night, with a young lady public servant, and we enthused about travel for a while. I’m getting to have some knowledge about the world and its people, but I trust that I’m not turning into a bore.
“Have you been there?” she asked, after a slide showed a ‘Welcome to Egypt’ sign, with RingBear relaxing in the last rays of the African sun.
“Just for a few minutes in Port Said,” I said, “And I spent a day in Sharm El Sheik, but that hardly counts.”
“I just asked, because I’ve just come back from Egypt and Morocco. Last week, I was in the Sahara, living with a nomad family.”
My jaw dropped open. Paris and Washington are all very fine, but small potatoes compared to this. And just last week!
She went on to tell me how she and her mother had gone on a tour through North Africa, and she had liked Morocco so much that after seeing her mother onto a plane home, she had gone back into the desert for a longer and deeper experience. She described the empty landscape, the unworldly evenings out in the open, the opportunities for personal reflection so far away from the noise and distractions of civilisation.
And the people of the desert. “I started teaching the children the alphabet,” she said, “Sitting down with them, drawing the shapes of the letters and saying their names. And after a while, I’d glance up to see the camel herdsmen standing behind me, looking over my shoulder. By the end of the morning, they were sitting down with the children.”
I was charmed. Here was the Sahara floating into my midnight cab, the sights and sands drifting in and settling over the curves of the dashboard. Northbourne Avenue turned into a dusty track, the moonlight sculpting the dunes into frozen waves of flowing art.
And there was aso Canberra dropped into the middle of the Sahara, an al fresco classroom run by a public servant on holiday.
What a wide, wonderful world we live in. Never question why I drive a cab. It’s for the travel.
We pulled up in a tree-lined street, the fallen leaves thick in the grass, and I watched her slender figure vanish through the shrubs in the front garden. I could think of another reason why nomadic camel herders would want to spend time in the company of a delightful young woman. Everything about her would have been doubly entrancing and exotic to them, and they would listen to her foreign voice as she told of kangaroos and meat pies, the stars upside down and the golden wattle in the springtime.
No, it’s not the travel. It’s the people who make my job a delight.
I sighed happily, pushed a few buttons on my iPod, and Dido’s sweet voice filled my taxi:
I could get on a plane and fly away
From the road where the cars never stop going through the night
To a life where I can watch the sun set and take my time, take all our time.
I've still got sand in my shoes and I can't shake the thought of you
I should get on, forget you but why would I want to...
