It was night time, quite late—that much I remember. I think there were six of us, or maybe five. Enough that we didn’t fit comfortably into the taxi on the way there. Enough that we couldn’t or didn’t all pile into the same taxi to get back to our hotel at the end of the evening, which is when the stranded part happened.
I was in college, all of 19 years old, on a school-sponsored trip to Morocco, only the second time I’d been abroad. It was a fascinating, very foreign-feeling country for one so untraveled. My classmate-travel companions were (or seemed to be—no they actually were) much worldlier and more sophisticated than I was. We were in Rabat, the third stop on our tour of the country. After a traditional Moroccan dinner—during which it was awkward that a member of our group yet again pretended to be vegetarian because she didn’t want to eat lamb meat—someone had suggested we go to an upscale hotel across town where there was a sort of lounge where we could hear a live jazz band. It might have been Lori who suggested it, although truthfully I’m not sure if that was her name even though I can see her somewhat blurred face and round glasses in my memory.
The hotel lobby was opulent and nearly deserted. Lots of marble and plush sofas and chairs in careful arrangements. The bathroom off the lobby had big gilded mirrors and little cloth hand towels and a perfumed scent in the air. Someone else in the group said you could always tell the quality of a hotel by its lobby bathroom and this bathroom seemed to bear that out.
The club/lounge was on the top floor of the hotel, with big windows looking out over the city. If we’d been in a non-Muslim country, it would have been called an upscale bar. The lighting was dim and a Western-style jazz group played from a raised dais at one end of the room, the city lights providing a backdrop to their set. Bass, guitar, drums, maybe a keyboard? That part is hazy. Lori requested “Girl from Ipanema,” which I’d never heard before but thereafter became the standard of mellow jazz music to me, a song so famous that even musicians in Morocco knew it.
Sometime after midnight we left the club and went outside to return to our own hotel. One taxi was waiting outside the door and everyone climbed into it but a guy named Ed and me. We either didn’t want to sit on each other’s laps again or the driver refused to take us all in one go; I’m not sure which it was. The driver asked if we wanted him to come back for us after he’d dropped off our friends and we declined, certain that another taxi would be along shortly. We went to school in New York City, where taxis are almost as plentiful as cockroaches, regardless of the hour, and naively assumed it worked that way here too. The taxi left, and Ed and I waited.
The only things I remember about Ed are that he was a sophomore like I was, he wasn’t very tall, and his family had emigrated to the US from a country in South Asia before he was born. (Unfortunately, I don’t remember which country. Sorry, Ed!) He was a nice guy with a light-up smile, quiet and unassuming and maybe a little bit nerdy.
We stood outside the hotel, scanning the street at the end of the hotel’s drive for taxis. None drove past. In fact, hardly any cars drove past. The hotel was quiet inside and the city outside seemed to be asleep too. We probably made some small talk while we waited.
And waited.
Why weren’t any taxis driving past? This was not right.
Neither of us was sure what to do and neither of us seemed to feel very brave. I didn’t grow up in New York and therefore didn’t have that New Yorker confidence and I don’t think Ed did either, though we both pretended to be merely bored and irritated rather than starting to get worried. I didn’t have much experience with traveling abroad much less being stranded abroad and I felt too timid to ask for help. In retrospect, this seems silly but it was very real at the time.
After a while—10 minutes? 20?—we went inside the lobby and Ed bravely asked the front desk if any other taxis were likely to come by and how soon. The clerks shook their heads gravely and said taxis did not come to the hotel at this time of night and in fact very few taxis were likely to be on the road at all.
Oh.
We must have looked fairly desperate because they said they would try to call us a taxi. We gave ourselves over to more waiting.
Indeed, the waiting is what I remember most clearly about that evening. All the waiting. What felt like and might have been an hour or more of waiting. And feeling stranded, stuck, trapped. Foreigners at the mercy of the two English-speaking front desk staff, without a clue where we were or how far our hotel was or how to get there or what else to do besides wait. We slumped in the plush lobby chairs while we waited for someone to come to our aid.
We were deep in our waiting reveries when one of the clerks called out “Mr. Ed! Mr. Ed!” My ears perked up and I nudged Ed, who ran up to the desk.
“Did you say Ed?” he asked. “My name is Ed. I’m Mr. Ed.”
The clerk handed him the phone. It was our friends on the other end of the line, calling to say a taxi was heading our way. We were saved!
Ed and I smiled at each other with relief and went outside to wait again for a taxi. I was anxious and still worried, feeling we were still stranded even though help was on its way. Ed and I made nervous small talk punctuated by attempts at humor and short laughs. I think he was just as anxious as I was. I reached out and took his hand for reassurance to calm my nerves, a gesture he didn’t seem to mind.
At long last, the taxi arrived and sped us back to our hotel through dark, nearly empty streets. We didn’t talk on the drive back. When we pulled up in front of our hotel, we didn’t bother asking how much it cost or trying to figure out a proper tip. Instead, Ed simply tossed a handful of bills onto the front seat—grossly overpaying for the ride, as we figured out later—and we both scrambled out.
Our friends were waiting for us in the lobby of our hotel. I’d never been so happy to see them! Hugs and cries of relief all around, everyone talking over everyone else. They told us that they had waited and waited for us to arrive after them and when we continued not to appear, they realized something was wrong and decided to act. They somehow managed to flag down a passing taxi and gave him some money to drive to the jazz lounge hotel and pick us up, which he obviously had done. Their resourcefulness and concern for our well-being felt nothing short of heroic to me.
The next morning we were eager to tell the rest of the group about our adventure. Ed and I shared our side of the story, downplaying how worried we had been and laughing at our naïveté regarding how the taxi system worked in Rabat. We all shared a hearty laugh over the desk clerk calling out “Mr. Ed! Mr. Ed!” in the empty lobby as if paging the horse in the old-time TV show.
We did not talk about what would have happened had our friends not sent that taxi to pick us up. Somehow, now that we were back with the group, it didn’t seem to matter much. Instead, we piled into the tour bus together with our chaperones and tour guide and headed out to experience our next story.
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