You speak English. Take the phone.

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We got up the next morning and headed to the train station.  We arrived there in plenty of time.  We boarded the train, which was really excellent - clean, air conditioned.  It left on time.  It arrived about 30 minutes later than expected, but at this point I was THRILLED that we didn't hit a donkey or something on the way to Alexandria.

Alex was fine.  It's kind of dumpy for a beach town, run down and third world and all.  We went to the library, newly built and absolutely beautiful.  We also went to the fort - late, so we only spent five minutes there.  We finally decided to take a horse-drawn carriage ride for an hour throughout the city of Alex, seeing upscale neighborhoods and dumpy ones as well.  Overall there's not too much to report - a function of the fact that everything went smoothy.  This explains why it was such a good day.

Our cab drive from the train station to our hotel was another story.  Our cab driver spoke very little English, but we managed to tell him the name of our hotel.  After a couple of minutes he whips out his cell phone and gives it to Anant, saying 'You speak English, here.'  Anant takes the phone; me, Aryan, and Anant all think that he's asking for directions to the hotel in English or something.  In hindsight this makes no sense - if the cab driver needed directions, why not just speak to our driver in Arabic?  But anyway.  Anant repeats slowly where he's staying, and then the cab driver gives the phone to me.  I thought maybe he wanted me to say a word in Arabic - earlier I had been teaching James, Anant and Aryan how to say 'pencil' (qalam) in Arabic; maybe he wanted to repeat the lesson on the phone?  So when he handed me the phone I just kept saying qalam.  Why not?  I got a good laugh out of it, and what else was I supposed to say?

The scenario repeated itself a couple times; finally Anant started asking 'Who are you?  What do you want?'  Anant couldn't make sense of it.  First the guy was saying that he wanted to give Anant 60 pounds; then he said that he wanted Anant to give him 60 pounds...meanwhile the dude on the phone would not say where he was, who he was, anything.  I shrugged it off.

The cab driver asked us our names.

'Anant'

'Aryan'

'Sarah'

'Martin.'

I looked at James and smiled, thinking maybe he was just being James, but there seemed to be a lot more going on in his head.

We got to the hotel safely. Afterwards we got James' take on the situation: it was really sketchy because he had absolutely no idea what was going on, what the driver or guy on the cell phone wanted from us, or how the driver was using our hotel information or names.  To James, these were all red flags the rest of us didn't catch.  The fact that James didn't know what was going on gave him (and us) no control over the situation whatsoever.  And a situation is dangerous when you have no control.

In our first few days of travel, James reveled in situations that I frankly found dangerous.  His comfort zone was my left field.  And suddenly we encounter situation that seems fine to me and he grows incredibly anxious and worried.  James can be pretty crazy sometimes.  But it was also reassuring to know he's not totally reckless; he has an internal compass that keeps him from really, really dangerous situations.  I was glad to have him around that night.