American Gringa Gweilo: Taxis

[This is the third part in a series of articles examining cultural differences between the United States, Brazil and Hong Kong, the three countries in which I've lived.]

I didn't use taxis much in the United States. Who does? Taxis are for rich New Yorkers, poor everyone else, and the occasional drunk. Other than going to and from Newark Airport, I've never used a taxi service there, and the extent of my experience with drivers is possibly convincing two of them to try their hand at smuggling electronics into heavily taxed Brazil to sell at a profit. Hey, it helped pay my bills.

In São Paulo, I didn't take taxis that often, even preferring to make the long trek on foot from Consolação station to my apartment in Higienópolis at midnight.

But not long after moving to the city, I was unceremoniously kicked out of a friend's huge 3-bedroom apartment in Jardins, where I'd been crashing until I found a place of my own.

This friend regularly hosted gringoes and gringas passing through when his businessman father, who owned the apartment, was traveling. Once he realized his son was running a boarding house, he said we'd all have to leave because, God, we might stuff their 42-inch plasma TV into a backpack, take it to Carnaval in Rio with us and exchange it for Sambadrome tickets.

After I'd miraculously found an apartment on short notice, he packed me and my life's possessions into a taxi and clearly told the driver the address, and the driver nodded in understanding. The trip from Jardins to Higienópolis is an easy one, one that should be familiar to almost any driver.

But I was a foreigner. A foreigner who did not speak Portuguese even at a basic proficiency, other than greetings and curse words. Picture Henry Sobel yelling, "Oi, tudo bem? Vai tomar no cú, seu filho da puta!" That was me. And it meant the taxi driver saw an opportunity to make a little extra cash by taking the long way.

He finally made it to the street my building was on, and as he approached it, I said, "Aqui." He didn't acknowledge me. I furiously pointed at the building and yelled, "AQUI!" He smiled. And kept fucking driving. He drove past the apartment and down several other streets, stopping for about five minutes to have a leisurely conversation with other drivers at a taxi stand and pretending that he was asking for directions.

By the time he decided he'd screwed me over enough and "found" my building, I was angry and had no intention of paying whatever jacked-up price he wanted to charge. He showed me the meter, smirked and shrugged, and I was able to use some Portuguese I'd learned in my first week of language classes, "Isso é um roubo!" This is a rip-off.

He said nothing. "Isso é um roubo!" He started to yell back at me, but I didn't understand him. "Isso é um roubo, asshole!"

I calculated what the fare should have been, handed that to him, grabbed my bags and got out. He started to exit the taxi, and I turned around and, with all of hatred in my heart that I feel toward scam artists, shouted, "Vai-te foder!" Go fuck yourself.

That was my only bad experience with a taxi driver in Brazil, but then, I only took a taxi about five or six times.

Two weeks after my move to Hong Kong, I was supposed to attend a conference with my husband in Sanya, China. A week before the trip, we left a laptop bag, which also had our passports and cell phones, in a taxi. We didn't get the driver's name or the taxi number, and other than the token gesture of leaving our information with the taxi lost and found hotline and reporting it to the police, there wasn't much we could do.

I thought we might get our passports back, if the driver couldn't figure out how to make money off of them, but I didn't expect to see the laptop or cell phones again.

A couple of days later, the police from a station in New Territories called to say that a taxi driver dropped off the bag, and everything was still in it. When we arrived at the station, after confirming our identities, the police handed us our items -- all of which had been placed in individual plastic bags, and they'd removed the battery from the laptop to prevent it from draining.

We wanted to leave a reward for the driver, but he refused to accept it and said our appreciation was enough for him. Hong Kong is allegedly one of the worst places in which to lose a cell phone, but I've never had a bad experience in the 70 or so times I've taken a taxi here (other than the drivers who don't understand "Cyberport").

And that's a good thing because I have no idea how to say, "This is a rip-off, you son of a bitch" in Cantonese.