Foreigners in Motion

After grudgingly taking the Greyhound up to Montreal for Spring Break, I was desperate to find a rideshare for the way back. I posted my request on craigslist more than a week in advance and checked the rideshare forum at least twice a day to see if anyone was heading to Boston on St Patrick's Sunday. After a few days, I received this rather colorful message:

hi if you are willing to help me in gas confortable car please give me call 617 XXX XXXX thanks

So I called the number and spoke to a man with a Borat-esque accent who told me to name a price. I said I was accustomed to paying around $35 one way.

“Maybe when gas was $1.50," he cackled, "now it’s $3.50!”

Apparently I had named an outrageous price.

“Make it $40,” he continued, “and we’ll call it a deal.”

“Uh…ok” (I was tempted to bargain him down to $38 but thought I’d count my blessings).

This guy clearly meant business. I was a tad apprehensive about spending 5 to 6 hours in his car, no matter how “confortable” it was. But it turned out – as it always does – that he was a pretty cool guy.

Jamal immigrated to the States from Algeria in 1990 when he was 30-years-old. At 48, he has a wife and 15-year-old twins, and although he possesses an engineering degree and owns a renovation business, currently works as a cab driver to “pay the bills.”

Jamal is Berber and compared the linguistic tensions between Berbers and Arabs in Algeria to Quebec’s language politics. He also caught me up on centuries of Arabic Rae music; it's not bad, though I was half disappointed that Sting never showed up for a chorus.