Saturday, November 28, 2009

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice...

Egyptians love a good scam, and this is something that takes a lot of getting used to from a foreigner's perspective. If you let your guard down you'll lose the shirt off your back and yet somehow walk away thinking you've been done a great favor. It's only when you get home and take stock of the encounter that you suddenly slap your hand to your forehead and cry out in shame and consternation, "Well I'll be damned! Duped again!"

This is not an isolated Egyptian phenomenon, of course. Scammers exist in every country. But unlike other places, there are several characteristics that are unique to Egypt scamming.

1. Scamming is an omnipresent fact of life.

No matter where you go and no matter what you do, someone is going to try and rip you off. Taking a taxi? Expect them to ask for too much. Want to buy a pack of cigarettes? Chances are they'll try and tack on a few extra pounds. Ask someone for directions? It is quite likely that, if they offer to show you to where you're going, they will actually take you in an entirely different direction regardless of the urgency of your mission of the actual direction of your destination

[NOTE: I have experienced this personally. I was on my way to a doctor's appointment downtown to be treated for an eye infection, and a nice, friendly man offered to show me the way. I followed him blindly - literally, my eye infection was so bad I could barely see where he was going - only to find that he was leading me to his perfume shop! He managed to keep me there for about three minutes and force me to smell about five different perfumes before I finally stormed out in righteous indignation, yelling about the fact that I was going to see the damn doctor and that I was ashamed that he would try to take advantage of me when I was in pain! I am guessing he did not take my little moral admonishment to heart, but it made me feel better. END NOTE]

The above anecdote leads us to the second unique characteristic of Egyptian scamming, though:

2. The people doing the scamming mean absolutely no harm, and see nothing wrong with what they are doing.

If someone has lots of money, and another person has very little money, then why wouldn't the second person try to take some of it? It only makes sense, and it is certainly not personal. As it is, someone told the entire developing world that Americans are endless founts of wealth, which means, to this developing world, that they can take money from us without actually causing any harm. So if the person being duped does not stand to lose anything, and the person doing the duping stands to gain everything - well, isn't duping the sensible course of action?

This, then, leads to our third characteristic, and the topic that inspired this blog post:

3. Egyptian scamming is, more than anything, an inside joke of sorts - and if you see through that joke the "scammers" are usually more than willing to share the laugh with you.

I think that Egyptians like to see what they can get away with, sort of like when you play a practical joke on your friends and being caught can be half the fun. Underneath it all they're trying not to crack up, and if you catch them in the act, for the most part, they love it (obviously there are numerous exceptions, but we're going with the trend that most Egyptians are friendly and jolly, even if they are not always well-intentioned).

Case in point: tonight. I went to Khan al-Khalili, the big souk in al-Azhar, with two friends to find some Christmas presents for people back home. Khan is a scammer's paradise of course - foreigners with big juicy wallets, limited time, and little knowledge of local quality and prices looking for gifts for everyone they know. What could be better? You have to bargain hard to get things for what they're worth, and even then it can be tough, as vendors know that if you and your friends don't want Article A the little Japanese couple behind you might just snap it up for triple the price.

But avoiding being ripped off in a place like Khan al-Khalili is not such an unheard-of accomplishment, because you are expecting people to rip you off there. I mean, if you live next to a highway you're going to look for cars when you cross the road. It's the other places - the places you don't expect a scam - where you really have to watch out.

After spending several hours in the Khan my friend and I sat down for some dinner at a cafe/restaurant across the street. They had a huge cone of shwarma sizzling out front and we both had a hankering for a lamb sandwich. We walked up to the host's podium and asked for a menu - however, when we looked at the menu (which was written in English), something seemed wrong. The shwarma was 12 pounds! Though this is the equivalent of maybe $2.50, the fact of the matter is, it was way too much for a simple shwarma sandwich. That was when I noticed that the menus were separated into two piles, and the host had grabbed our menu from the pile on the right. I had my first twinge of suspicion. Since my friend was looking at the menu and it would be perfectly reasonable for me to want my own, I went to grab one from the pile on the left

"Oh no no!" cried the host. "Here." He grabbed a right-hand menu and gestured it toward me.

Lightbulb!

I checked the price, and there is was: shwarma sandwich, 12 EP. I raised my eyebrow at the host and said loudly to my friend (who was marveling at the cost), "I see what's going on here - this is the English price."

It is not uncommon for things in Egypt to have two separate prices: Egyptian prices and foreigner prices. It's actually codified in some places, like museums and national monuments, where locals sometimes pay half as much as tourists. It is supposed to make it easier for Egyptians to learn about their own history, but I think it's more a convenient and easily-justifiable way to make a couple extra pounds off rich foreigners.

And if you think about it, they've got every right to do this! I mean, why not, if you can get away with it? But this is my point, and the purpose of this story: now that I've lived here for four months, I think it's about darn time I qualified for Egyptian shwarma prices!

So I grabbed the other menu.

"No no!" said the waiter. "This in Arabic!"

"Ah ha!" I cried triumphantly. "I SPEAK Arabic!"

Flipping open the menu I ran my finger down to the shwarma, and with the self-satisfied voice of victory declared: "Shwarma laham - TISA GINEHAT!" (9 EP)

And with that, the host knew I was on to him.

And he cracked up! "You speak Arabic?" he asked, huge smile on his wide face. "Very good, very good! You speak Arabic!"

"Yes, I speak Arabic" I responded (in Arabic as well). "And I would like a shwarma sandwich, for nine pounds!"

So my friend and I ate our sandwiches and drank our tea (the tea now being two pounds, instead of the five we had originally been told), and the host smiled and laughed with us throughout the entire meal. All it took was a little knowledge of letters and numbers, and we went from being the butt of the joke to the co-conspirators! I know it might not seem like that big a deal - after all, we saved maybe 15 pounds total, which is only about three dollars between the two of us. But don't you see? in reality, it was so much more than that.

Because in the end, the taste of uncompromised dignity is the sweetest meal of all.

2 comments:

  1. You have the BEST stories! Come home soon so you can tell me all of them in person. <3

    ReplyDelete
  2. I kept reading shwarma as shwarm. and that made it really funny.

    ReplyDelete

Followers