Citadel!” my taxi driver shouted in Arabic, our eyes locking in the rearview mirror. “Take off your clothes!”I was on my way to one of Cairo’s famous landmarks: the Citadel, a massive fortress built by Salah al-Din, the famous crusader-crusher, almost a millennium ago. We were traveling in a tin-pot Panda, one of Cairo’s aging fleet of black-and-white taxis, an endangered species now that sleek white sedans with all mod cons (including working meters and windows that slide, rather than fall, down) roam the land. Given my experience of sexual harassment in the city, I should have been outraged by my driver’s suggestion, or at the very least relieved that he didn’t reach over with a helping hand. But I was, in fact, grateful. “You are right.” I laughed. “A thousands thanks,” I added, for what was less a proposition and more a lesson in pronunciation.“Citadel” is what we call this bastion in English; in Arabic, however, the word is Qal’a, something of a mouthful the way Egyptians say it.
