One Big Failure After Another...

Last night, after a day filled with relaxed productivity, making the mini lantern in the picture (some of you might learn how to make one when I get back!) and general good things, one plan after another went wrong and we ended up paying about 700 NT$ for taxi rides into and back from the city, after doing nothing but walk around a city block for 15 minutes.

A bunch of us were trying to go to a Discotheque to go dancing together, but there were a lot of us so we had to send groups in three taxis. I was in the first taxi. We had had the front desk write down the address of the place in Mandarin, but they only wrote it once so we showed it to the cab driver, he wrote it down, and told us he knew where it was. No one in my cab spoke Mandarin, so I was self-appointed to the front seat because at least I know my numbers and a few words here and there.

We get into Taipei (pretty fast) and when we're on the street that he wrote down the address for, he drives around the block twice and gets across that the number that we gave him (or he wrote down) for the place doesn't exists. My only choice was to pay and thank him for his services. He tried to charge me 100 NT$ more because we had 4 people in the cab, but I acted ignorant to anything he was saying and gesturing because I saw the number on the meter, and that's what I paid him. So we're left to wander the (relatively inactive) streets of Taipei. At this point, our only choice is to look around. There are a lot of hidden nightclubs in Taipei, maybe it's one of those? Maybe the other groups are on their way to the same address that went extinct? Who knows, as long as he doesn't keep running up our tab by driving around the block. So we get out, wait for the other groups, to no avail, and looked around the area a bit, also to no avail. The place was dead. There wasn't even a 7/11. 7/11 = sign of life in Taipei.

So after capturing the absurdity of the incident, we decide to take a cab back to the hotel and have a dance party in my room. The driver of the cab we chose seemed nice enough. Little did I know he was the slowest cab driver in the world and would take us the most round about way home. I don't think he broke 40 mph the whole way home, which way mostly on a highway. The total for that ride was almost 200 NT$ more than the first.

We look up the address compared to where we were when we get back to my room. We were on the right road, had the right address, in the right city, in the right country...in Section 2, not Section 1, about a kilometer away from our destination. Every other group managed to get there, the address was not written wrong. I'm going to assume good intention and say that he wrote it down wrong, but come on now, really? With all that character reading and you get the section number wrong? Maybe the second driver thought he was taking the fastest route. But I've taken 4 or 5 taxis back from Taipei and he was the only one who went south around the city.

Next time, we'll get our stuff together before midnight and take public transportation in. No questions asked. I'll learn the language as much as I can while I'm here, but I won't be able to have discussions with taxi drivers enough to get to a place I've never been before. Or tell them thanks for taking the long way home.

B(ee)