Spent a lovely evening and night with her and, the next morning, went to call a cab. After about 20 minutes, a huge Cadillac Escalade shows up, a short, dapper Indian gentleman with a bluetooth headset screwed into his ear comes in and collects us. We climb up and into this huge vehicle and we're off! The first thing I notice is that the leather seats are polished. I don't have my seatbelt on and the arm rest is up so I go sliding off the seat. I laughed and put on the belt and put down the arm rest as we began careening down the Burlington County and State roads heading to Maple Shade.
The driver begins talking to us, asking where we are from. What we had been up to. Why we were going to Maple Shade and not to, say Philadelphia International Airport. Now, my fiance is from New York City but the driver seemed unwilling to accept her word that she was from there. I guess the accent wasn't enough for him. He seemed to accept, readily enough, that I was from "everywhere" and we barrelled down the roads.
About ten minutes into the ride, he turns on the radio, or at least the sound system. Indian pop music plays and a screen lights up on his dashboard with the accompanying music video. Thinking we want to see the video, he reaches behind him and fumbles around, dropping the Escalade's rear seat video screen down and we are treated to a song that sounds like "Dirty Disco". Did some research later and the song is actually called "Dard e Disco" or "Pain of Disco". It was, indeed, painful. The music video seemed to be completely about a very buff Indian man (later found out it was actor Shahrukh Khan) lip syncing and dancing along with a lot of blonde ladies. He emerged out of water. They threw water on him so the fabric of his shirt clung to his awesome abs. This was followed by an Indian woman singing something, I haven't been able to track down what her song was, even though we heard it twice.
As we caroomed down the highways, our driver alternately singing along with the music and shouting in Hindi at whoever was on the phone with him, I noticed that, according to his GPS, we were coming up on our exit. Then, we passed our exit. Dard e Disco. Then we came up on another one, and while he was shouting along with the lyrics, we passed that one too, Dard e Disco. Finally, he noticed that he could exit at the next exit and zoomed over and got off the highway. After zipping around the backroads a bit, I saw Iron Hill and pointed it out to him. I also pointed out to him the jug handle he would need to take to get over there*, as he looked like he was going to simply drive on the wrong side of the road for about 100 yards to get to the driveway. Dard e Disco.
We got out of the Escalade and paid the man $60 which included a $15 dollar tip because we didn't want to talk to him any more, we just wanted to get out of the truck. We were laughing about the whole thing, it was another adventure of a marvelous weekend.
Dard e Disco.
*In New Jersey, you can't make left hand turns, a lot of times. You have to proceed to a traffic light which will have a turnoff that will allow you to cross traffic. These are called "Jug Handles" because of what they look like on a map.
