Taxi Adventures

Taking a taxi in China is not always as straightforward as you might think.  Most times, you get in one, you tell them where to go and they take you there.  But sometimes weird stuff happens.  Adam discovered this first when he went to ChangChun for the first time.  He and Mr. Hong were visiting a customer that’s located way out in the boondocks.  Several taxis came by but when the drivers found out where they wanted to go, they said no because it was a long distance and there was little chance that they could pick someone else up on their way back.  They finally got to their destination only because a taxi that already had someone in it stopped and picked them up. 

Another time, Adam needed to go in to work on a Sunday and our regular driver couldn’t take him for some reason.  The plant is about 20 minutes away from our apartment and it’s not near downtown so again, it would be hard for the driver to pick someone else up right away.  Taxis are dirt cheap in Huainan so the drivers don’t make much money if they’re not picking up new passengers right after dropping others off.  So instead of turning the meter on, the driver wanted to negotiate a price.  He wanted 35RMB originally but Sophie talked him down to 25 over the phone.

Smudgie's butt

Over the New Year’s holiday, we needed to go grocery shopping.  We bought a lot of stuff because our housekeeper had the time off so we had to make our own meals.  So we’re carrying these incredibly heavy bags and trying to get a taxi, but none of the taxis wanted to take us to our apartment, even though it’s on the same freakin’ street as the Carrefour.  Finally we offered a driver 20RMB (which is 4x the normal rate) to take us home.  And he actually had the audacity to refuse us at first.  But he finally said ok.  We told him the address, and said “bei men” which means “north entrance”.  We said it several times, and he obviously didn’t know his way around this apartment complex because as we were telling him to go left, he missed the north entrance and took a left at the next intersection.  We arrived at the west entrance and we were like “bei men!”  And he was like “This is the west entrance” and I was like, “I know!”  (in Chinese of course) but I didn’t know how to say that he missed the north entrance and that he was a douchebag, so we just got out of the taxi.  I was pretty pissed because the west entrance is quite far from our apartment so we had to carry those heavy bags all that way.

I’ve been traveling to Shanghai a lot lately for customer meetings.  First we (Mandy and I) take a taxi from Huainan to BungBu (one hour) then take the highspeed train (2 hours) then take the subway (1 ½ hours because of line changes) to Anting which is where all the car companies are located.  But we don’t take a regular taxi to BungBu, there are special cars that go from the RT-Mart to the train station all day and if there are 4 passengers (a full car) then the rate is 40RMB per person.  A similar thing happens on the way back.  When you get off the train and exit the station, there’s always a line of guys yelling out different city names.  We go to the Huainan guy and he tries to gather up more passengers before leaving.  If you can get 4 people together, yay!  If not, you have to pay more.  The taxi guy insists on getting his 160RMB, which sucks.  This is what happened to us on the latest trip.  We had to pay the 160 instead of 80.  And Mandy told me the company only pays for 80, which is stupid.  And about halfway there, our driver stopped and a taxi going the other way also stopped.  They talked for a while and all of a sudden we were switching cars.  Our original driver went back to BungBu and the new driver took us to Huainan.  It was crazy.

Also, a sidenote.  Before coming here I always thought people would just assume I was American.  But this is not so!  They always ask where I'm from.  And I once overheard a guy say he thought I was British, and the driver of the taxi yesterday said he thought I looked Russian.  What? 

Smudgie looks like a hairy gumdrop