IT’S POURING rain: we are waiting on a street corner in downtown Athens. We’ve been here for fifteen minutes. The famous yellow cabs are two a euro on the road, and all around me people are waving at them and shouting.
Finally, one stops for us, winds down his window and shouts, “Pou?” “Kolonaki,” we reply. He looks disapproving, tuts, waves his arms and drives off without another word, leaving us wetter than before. Is there a face policy? Did he think we said Kosovo? Did we look like hardened criminals?
But, no, all around people are risking life and limb to stand in the middle of a dual carriageway and shout at taxis, whose drivers shout back. It is totally bewildering. It happens again and again and again. Finally, exasperated as one stops, before he can ‘pou?’ and pull away, we jump in, and like dogs shake the drips from our hair.
He speaks perfect English with an American accent. “ Where ’ya going ladies?”
“Kolonaki,” we reply.
“Ladies,” he says, with deep sighing resignation. “This taxi don’t go to Kolonaki.”
“Why not?” we ask. Kolonaki is not exactly in a no-go zone, a hot bed of revolutionaries. “This taxi is going to Kifissia”.
“But we don’t live in Kifissia, we live in Kolonaki. Aren’t taxis meant to take you where you want to go?”
“Lady,” he says with the exasperated patience of a man dealing with an Imbecile from a Foreign Place. “Lady, this is Greece.” At the next traffic lights he winds down the window, someone shouts.
“Kathiste,” he says flinging the door open. Two large ladies in black, laden with bags and boxes clamber in. One squeezes next to us and uses us as the overhead locker for her packages. The other chatters merrily in the front.
Eventually, we stop.
“Ladies, get out,” he tells us. Where are we? “Kolonaki,” he says. We peer into the dark. It doesn’t look like Kolonaki. “You sure this is Kolonaki?” “Yes, yes, up hill, turn left.”
There are times when you argue and there are times when you just cut your losses and run.
“Poso kani?” I ask. “Two euros,” he says.
Well it seems cheap enough, I suppose, for a taxi ride to somewhere we didn’t want to go, to be dropped we don’t know where, in the dark and pouring rain.
Immediately, a man shouts in the window. Our lugubrious driver now with fag in one hand, shouting down his mobile in the other, listening to the football results on the radio and continuing a conversation with the dowager duchess in the front about the state of her health puts his foot on the throttle and power boats off. He disappears down the watery road, leaving us, and the man, sodden from his wash.
It seems that taxis in Athens make their money by picking up people going on the same route. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a toff with a rolled umbrella, a blond bimbo or an old dear on your last legs. If you aren’t going, where they’re going, tough.
Many will be radio taxis on their way to collect passengers from a particular destination, which is why they don’t want to go off route. It’s actually illegal, but while the meter is ticking on someone else’s account, it’s their opportunity to earn a few euros on the side.
On the other hand, as one demonstrated to me the other day, it can be seen as a means tested social service. My ordered radio taxi back to Kolonaki, paid for on the meter by me, gave one elderly old man, a Philippina maid and student from the university a lift up the hill.
When I asked the driver why they hadn’t paid any thing to come along for the ride. He simply smiled and said, “You live in Kolonaki.”
Ken Livingstone could learn a tip or two..
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