Cab Sickness

In China, the lanes on streets and highways are suggestions. Sometimes drivers respect them. Often times, they do not.

On a typical day, my family and I may walk to many of the places we wish to go. Elly's school, the fitness club, church (which is in the gym), many restaurants, shops and grocery stores are all within reasonable walking distance. When my Dad goes to work, our driver Mr. Tian takes him 25 minutes or so east of our house to his office. After Tian takes Dad to work, he is at the disposal of my Mom (and for now, I) to drive us to whatever exciting destination in Shenzhen we want to go to until he returns to the office at 5:30. On the weekends, however, this convenient situation changes. If we want to go somewhere we can't walk, we have to hail a cab. Okay, and I know this doesn't sound that bad, but you have to realize that in China your relationship with the person driving you around involves a great deal of trust. You can't read the signs, you don't know where you're going amidst the complex network of highways and dusty streets, you can't speak the language and you just have to trust. And one more startling fact about cabs in China-if you do get in a wreck while in a cab, if your driver is at fault, the liability is on you! You have to pay. And there is no court that really gets involved. You call the police and duke it out in the street and decide whose fault it was and somebody has to agree to pay up. My instincts tell me that as a person without Mandarin language skills, I would lose that battle.

That being said, I'll share a little bit about my transportation experiences today. After church, my family and I decided to go to a popular mall on the other side of Shenzhen for lunch at a nice Chinese restaurant. Driver-less as we are on Sundays, we went to the front of our neighborhood and hailed a cab. With four of us in the backseat we obviously couldn't use seatbelts, so it was already feeling a bit risky from the moment we peeled away from the curb. Less than five minutes into the ride, there were gasps from the backseat as a silver car moved into our lane and our driver swerved out of the way, honking his horn for way too long as he drove on. Rather than keeping our distance from this idiot car, our cab driver of course felt it necessary to accelerate and cut off this car, almost swiping it. All for the sake of even-ness I suppose. Glad we're mature... We did make it safely to our destination though and had a delicious lunch (photo above), complete with pointing at pictures and receiving of mystery dishes. One dish we ordered was called "Apple," in addition to a description in Chinese characters. When we received it, however, "Apple" was a platter full of sliced pork encased in golden fried shells. It did look like apples from the outside...but there was no actual apple in the dish. As the lone vegetarian in the crew I've found its best to let my sister eat everything first, glance at her for the go-ahead, and then serve myself. You never know when pork will jump out of your apple here.

After our authentic lunch, we made our way back outside to find a cab home. Dad selected one, pulled out his Jing Shan Villa card that says our neighborhood address in Chinese, and watched for his response. He pondered as Elly said our neighborhood name in Chinese and he nodded, motioning that he understood. We all piled in. We were met with the melodious-not! notes of a Chinese songstress. Emily yelled forward to Dad that he had her permission to turn off the radio. He didn't. As we continued down the road the smell of gasoline permeated the interior of the vehicle. It smelled exactly like riding the bumper boats at Celebration Station when there's just been a gas spill. Except it continued for 28 minutes straight. We rolled down the windows and tried to suck in fresh air with little success. The cab driver picked up his brick-sized cell phone and began yelling in Mandarin. After a couple minutes Elly managed to make out that he was talking about our neighborhood, apparently asking for help finding it. Awesome. We exited the highway and came up on a dusty patch of road. The driver rolled up all the windows, and I looked towards my Mom who was also turning green with the now stagnant smell of gasoline that continued to thicken the air. Desperate to get out, Emily yelled at the next street corner for the driver to stop, stop in Mandarin. She has learned at least one useful word in Chinese class...We all stumbled out with relief, happy to walk the last 20 minutes and gulp in that fresh China air...Safe to say we all lost a few brain cells to the fumes today. After washing all of our clothes and showering, I think we've all recovered. Just another day in Shenzhen...