a senseless taxi-ride

This morning, on my way to the airport (and to Montpellier for a seminar), Rock, my favourite taxi-driver, told me of a strange ride he endured the night before, so strange that he had not yet fully got over it! As it happened, he had picked an elderly lady with two large bags in the vicinity after a radio-call and drove her to a sort of catholic hostel in down-town Paris, near La Santé jail, a pastoral place housing visiting nuns and priests. However, when they arrived there, she asked the taxi to wait before leaving, quite appropriately as she had apparently failed to book the place. She then asked my friend to take her to another specific address, an hotel located nearby at Denfert-Rochereau. While Rock was waiting and the taxi counter running, the passenger literally checked in by visiting the hotel room and deciding she did not like it so she gave my taxi yet another hotel address near Saint-Honoré where she repeated the same process, namely visited the hotel room with the same outcome that she did not like the place. My friend was then getting worried about the meaning of this processionary trip all over Paris, the more because the lady did not have a particularly coherent discourse. And could not stop talking. The passenger then made him stop for food and drink, and, while getting back in the taxi, ordered him to drive her back to her starting place. After two hours and half, they thus came back to the place, with a total bill of 113 euros. The lady then handled a 100 euro bill to the taxi-driver, declaring she did not have any further money and that he should have brought her home directly from the first place they had stopped… In my friend’s experience, this was the weirdest passenger he ever carried and he thought the true point of the ride was to escape solitude and loneliness for one evening, even if chatting about non-sense the whole time.