Fakka. Fakka? Fakka!

Some words in Arabic, like any language really, are phonetically similar to English words. Occasionally, this occurs with amusing results.

In the great video game of living in Cairo, one of my favorite mini-missions is collecting small bills. Apparently Egypt has a shortage of small bills, so people in the know tend to hoard 25 pt (100 pt = 1 LE), 50 pt, 1 LE, and 5 LE notes. These bills are essential for tipping bathroom attendants, paying bus and taxi fare, and pretty much everything else associated with daily living. Especially for taxi drivers, it's nice to have exact change so you don't give the driver the option of claiming to have no change, or invite additional haggling. Just pay the man through the front passenger window and walk away.

My obsessive nature and overwhelming cheapness makes this a hell of a fun mini-game. Every chance I get, I'll try and extract change from a point-of-sale. It's gotten to the point that I actually divide up my money into 3 pockets: 1 for big bills (20 LE and up), one for smaller bills (5-10 LE) and one for small change (1 LE and less). That way, I can just whip out everything in my pocket, starting with the biggest bills, and claim not to have any small change.

One time while buying a large bottle of water (2 LE), I tried to pay with a 20 LE note. Cashier looks at the bill, then at me, and says "fakka". I blink, and blink again. Did he just curse at me? He didn't seem angry at all, or even slightly irritated. He repeated it again - "fakka?" I blinked some more, and then he sighed and just gave me 18 LE in change. As I was walking away, I figured out that "fakka" probably meant "change" or "what the hell" or something along those lines, an assumption later verified by some friends. It means "to break up or disassemble", such as breaking up a large bill into smaller bills - so "do you have anything smaller", pretty much.

New mini game, at least for now - smiling and saying "fakka" at every point of sale when I try to pay for something with a bill that is at least 10 times larger than the actual cost of the item. The 11-year-old in me giggles every time, hehe. Then I walk away with my precious, precious change.