Taxis!

Yeah, I know, I kind of cheated with that last post. Alas. But this is my Diary, and I get to make the rules! Mwaha!

Anyhow, met up with the BBC people today, and it was an interesting experience. Fun, too. Went with a few of them in the morning to Beihai Park to film some clips for a segment, and while they did that I got to wander around. (ETA: Photos are up!)


Beihai Park is yet another one of Beijing's beautifully scenic areas: a pagoda surrounded by old buildings in the middle of a lotus-strewn lake. On the surrounding lakeside are people who write calligraphy on the pavement in water...


... and other street performers like musicians and ribbon-dancers. One old woman pressed a streamer into my hand, so I had a go:


It's... harder than it looks.

I ran some errands during the day (yeah, I was totally right with the title of this thing), and at one point we tried to find a hotel near the Olympic stadium. Well, it took us 2 hours and 4 laps around the Olympic Park. It was an utterly surreal experience: the cab driver was convinced it was one place, and we knew it was somewhere else, and watching a well-known BBC reporter argue with a cabbie in Chinese is a spectacle I'll not soon forget ("Why bother running a hotel if you can't tell your guests how to get there?!").

The thing is, though, it wasn't the cabbie's fault. It was a new hotel, with a new name, and even the staff there couldn't give directions. That's the thing... Beijing is literally re-making itself for the Olympics, and while they're doing a lot of stuff right, they're also causing problems. Half of the roads downtown are blocked off for visiting dignitaries or for Olympic Business, so your cab will go halfway to your destination before realising that he can't go any further. That is, of course, if you manage to get him to understand where you want to go in the first place; most of the cabbies don't speak a word of English, and if you haven't got a Chinese translation of your destination, you're sunk. And on top of that, you have the problem of a lot of cab drivers having no idea where stuff is. After living in London, where you've got The Knowledge, it seems strange as hell.

In about a week's time, there are going to be a flood of foreign tourists who are all going to be trying to take taxis for convenience's sake. How they'll manage if they don't speak Chinese, I don't know.