Humidity Makes the Heart grow damper...

Do you wanna go for a ride? Take a taxi. After a nice day of business meetings and making new friends at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (USST) , three of my friends and I walked down Nanjing Road. It's a large shopping street, like many things I am required to see in Shanghai, and I needed to buy a Cuban cigar. A bunch of the group is having custom tailored suits and they just seem to go together. After making my purchase, we hailed a cab or at least tried to. People kept jumping in the cabs we hailed before we could get to them.

After what seemed like forever we found a cab. I explained where we wanted to go and the cab driver understood which was good. There was silence for a few minutes and the driver said something. Being the only person who could really understand what he was saying I, very limitedly, talked with him. Eventually I figured out that he was telling me that where we are staying has horrible food and he knew of a good restaurant. I said that is fine and we might check it out later. That was the end of it, save small talk, until we were getting farther and farther away from places we knew and into an area we had never seen before.

It turns out that the guy drops us off at this random hotel/restaurant. We play along, go inside and wait for this guy to leave. One of the guys started out a back entrench and we were going to avoid him all together, but as we turned the corner to hail a cab and go back to our real hotel we were spotted by the guy. He followed us around the block in his taxi as we walked. The taxi driver parked his cab and walked up to me with the money I had paid him in his hand and tried to give it back to me. I started yelling at him in Chinese that he took us to the wrong place and we did not want to eat at his restaurant. He gave my money back and did take us eventually to our hotel.

Post this trying taxi ride I have to give out some major props to my friends John and Ben. They don't speak any Chinese and I know how scary that situation can be. Especially if you don't have clue one what's going on.