Shanghai'd

Thursday morning I had to be reminded of why we decided to go home. Friday morning provided the reminder. It was raining, and we struggled to find a taxi to work in morning rush hour. We finally got in a light blue Da Zhong taxi, which should have been a good thing.

See, Shanghai has many cab companies and they are further recognizable by the color of the car. Light blue, yellow, white and light green are in the top half, meaning generally clean with careful, non-smoking drivers. They have rules posted on the stabber cage around the driver (rules such as "The driver has the right to refuse to accept service to drunks and schizophrenics), they almost always take the transportation card, and most cars have all 4 hubcaps. The bottom half of the companies drive dark blue or red cabs. The rules seem to be a bit more lax, and these are the guys who will rip you off, not take the card, and who may decide to take the sidewalk at 10pm, jumping a curb at 35 miles an hour to get up there while you are in the back seat with your pregnant friend and no seatbelts. No cabs have seatbelts. If you see a red cab with no hubcaps, run in the other direction and look for another cab. It's not worth it. Unless of course it is a Friday morning, its raining, rush hour and you both have 8:30 conference calls.

So, you can imagine how lucky we felt to score a light blue cab. But then, a cab driver is a cab driver, there are still no seatbelts, and the guy yesterday decided to test our patience by driving like an a**hole on the way to work yesterday. I will spare you the details of accellerating into the stoplights, crossing the double yellow in a construction zone to make a pass on the left, and vying with a large white van about who can have the line spot at every red light, regardless of where we started to stop (7 cars back, just go around on the left!). Tim put it well when he said: "Let's take a cab every day for our last month in China, just so we are thoroughly convinced we are ready to go home." With my plans to sell my bike in Nepal at the end of our Tibet trip, that just might happen.

Note: All this talk of going home, I bet you are wondering... we have almost set a date. We'll be home before December 1. Going back to Austin.