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Contributor: Kyle Alexander Beste
Country: China
City: Beijing
This is how we gave our cab drivers instructions. There were no common English phrases to help us, and the game of charades never got us anywhere. Those who spoke English were always very willing to help us with writing Chinese characters. This note is simply saying "Silk Market"
The interaction between ourselves and cab drivers as we handed them the names of our destinations was really strange. I always found myself smiling dumbly and hoping that they could read what I gave them. I have read since I've been back that many of the cab drivers in Beijing are actually from rural towns and are new to the city. If they were hoping we could give them directions they were certainly out of luck.
Definitely like this photo, and very appropriate that this is from Beijing, where the English/Chinese language barriers were the most apparent. The only people that seemed to speak english in Beijing were the tour guides and the hotel concierges, that's about it. When Jeff & I took a cab and it brought us to the wrong hotel, we were pretty much out of luck in terms of trying to get back. Luckily the cab driver figured it out, but not soon enough for us to avoid the shame of walking onto a bus full of clapping and jeers about being late.
I liked this example that Kyle used because my group ran into a few issues trying to give directions to cab drivers. There was definitely a huge language barrier because we couldn't use any english words or even pointing/acting out what we were trying to say. We gave an address with chinese characters to two different drivers one time and only one group made it to the location, while the other group got dropped off further down the street and we had trouble finding them!
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