People are so friendly

[kkbaby]

I'm teaching in Taichung at the moment. Just want to say how friendly the people are in general in Taiwan.

Over the Chinese new year, I went to Taipei to visit some friends. When I took a taxi, the driver was so friendly and turned off the meter because he took the wrong turn. He then left it off for the entire journey. I felt sorry for the guy cause he was in his 60's and obviously couldn't afford to retire.

Anyway, I wont forget this experience. We should all give at times in our life rather than just take take take.

[Hypiereon]

Nice of you to bring an example of good things that can happen. My wife and I had a similar experience in GuangZhou. Our standard Chinese at the time was extremely poor, and we had become separated from our tour group in a shopping district. When we tried to relocate our group, we only became even more lost and were ready to panic. Luckily I had a card from the hotel we were staying at and figured we'd be able to at least get back to the hotel and link up there.

We weren't too keen on taking a taxi because being foreigners with very little Chinese skills I thought we were setting ourselves up for the unguided tour the long way around GuangZhou back to our hotel. We tried speaking in standard Chinese (Mandarin) only to realize this driver had almost no clue because the standard Chinese in the southern area is Cantonese, not Mandarin. We showed him the card to our hotel, he smiled, and handed it back to me and waited - as if there was something more we were supposed to say or do.

At this point I had surpassed "ready to panic" mode into "full knee-jerk reactionary panic" mode. We tried our Mandarin one more time - much slower, and something in him clicked and he was able to mimic what we were saying alomst as badly as we were saying it. He somehow got the point that we wanted to go to this place on the card, radioed for directions, then got lost on his way there.

"I knew this was going to happen" I said to my wife who was frustrated, scared, and ready to cry. He got out of the car several times and asked for directions, and when we came to the hotel the meter was over 100 Yuan which happened to be more than we had on us. (We weren't planning on buying anything at else at this point and the only way to ensure that was to leave most of our money locked up back at the room - we took what we thought would be enough in case we got lost and needed to take a taxi but never actually expected this would happen.) I was sick. I just knew the guy would be angry with us for not having the money, and so I started trying to apologize before we reached the hotel - he kept saying something and waving his hands like he didn't understand me and didn't want to hear it.

I told my wife to wait in the car while I went to get someone from the hotel that spoke English. I brought the manager out to tell the driver that I'd be right back with the money, but that I'm sorry I didn't have enough right now. The guy made the same gestures and said the same things, then the manager turned to me and said, "He says you don't owe him anything because he got lost and feels bad about it."

I was stunned, looked at the meter again, and paid him what we had - 75 RMB. I have no idea what the cost of the taxi should have been, but the guy was being so kind and gracious I just wanted to give him a hug. We were back at our hotel, no worse for the wear but a little nervous and certainly ready to be a lot more cautious about not getting separated from our group.

I look back on that moment now and want to laugh. Today I'd have handled things completely different because now I know better about what to do when I get lost - plus it's a whole lot harder for me to even get lost these days. However, the kindness we experienced that day was very refreshing.