NY Taxi Drivers

Red Baron likes to walk for miles, particularly in foreign cities, but given the distances, I took a cab a couple of times during my recent visit to New York. The drivers I had were undoubtedly international.

New New York taxicabs: higher, shorter, and made by Ford

The first one was a Russian Jew or, rather, a Jewish Russian. He told me his father is a Jew and his mother is a Russian. So when he - freshly married to a Byelorussian girl - emigrated to Israel, he, with his non-Jewish mother, was considered just being a Russian. The discriminated and frustrated couple went to the States when his wife, a programmer, got a job offer from a New York firm. Now she is satisfied, but the guy still feels discriminated against and is frustrated because his wife earns all the money, whereas he, an architect by education, drives a New York taxi.

The second guy driving me came from Yemen. He told me that he has three uncles in Germany living in Cologne, Hamburg, and Berlin he is going to visit this summer. By then, his Berlin uncle will have moved to Munich. I informed him that his uncles had chosen the four most significant cities in Germany to live in.

After stepping off the cab, I thought, why are those Yemenis in Germany, and what are they doing there? Had his uncles got political asylum, but was Yemen not one of those Schurkenstaaten (pariah countries)? Following some research on the Internet, I found out that the US regards Yemen as a Tier 3 country, i.e., the people there are trafficking persons with the Yemeniti government not caring at all. In fact, the sea around the Horn of Africa is infested with pirates capturing ships and whole crews demanding their liberation ransom from shipping companies and governments.

The third guy did not speak to me at all, but driving with only one hand, he was talking nonstop into his mobile phone. I recognized many French words and thought his language might be Creole. When leaving the cab, I asked him, but he said he was from Ghana.

The language he spoke made me curious. In the German Wikipedia, I read: English is Ghana's official language, but in Ghana, more than eighty different languages are used such that most Ghanaians speak several of them. The government pushes French as an additional language, so since 2006, Ghana has been associated with the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie. Do they need a second lingua franca, or don't they like English? It was a pity that I could not ask my taxi driver those questions and, above all, test his personal language skills.

New York taxi drivers, indeed, are cosmopolitan.

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