Took a weekend trip to Guangzhou, the third largest city in China. It is close to Hong Kong. Rode the fast train (309 kmh), which I thought would be the most exciting part of the trip, boy was I wrong. Guangzhou has a metro system as well as a bus system and the metro was inexpensive and easy to navigate. Even though I only saw a small part of the city, I enjoyed it. To be as large as it is, I thought it was very quite, more quite than Changsha or Liuyang, and very clean. The cost of goods and services also seemed very reasonable, sometimes even less expensive than Changsha or Liuyang, which are smaller cities. Again, I hope to have pictures on my web site if I can get them to load.
Now to the excitement, although I am not sure the dictionary has enough words to describe the experience. Lucifer himself was driving the taxi I took from Changsha to Liuyang. It had to be Lucifer because he did not care about dying or who he took with him. Now the speed limit on the highway is 100kmh. Okay, that is about 65mph, not too fast, and one would assume that the speedometer in the car was also kmh since everything here is metric, right? So, the fact that the speedometer is showing that the car is going 100 - 120 should still be okay. WRONG. Let me tell you, we were NOT going only 65mph. It felt like 120 MILES PER HOUR. Add to that total disregard for any and all rules China does or does not have such as: using all four lanes, regardless of which way the traffic is supposed to be going on them; no turn signal/look to see if you can pass, just weave in and out/blowing your horn/I'm the only one with the right of way here; other vehicles stopping in the middle of the road/people walking/motor-scooters parked on the side/transfer trucks backing up down the middle of the street traffic; passing in the two lane TUNNELs. AND when he realized I was talking about his driving to my student and that he might be scaring me, he had the gall to tell me I should PRAY???!!!!!! Why did he think I was on my knees in the back of a taxi for???!!!! ADD to that him pumping the gas like he was keeping the beat or playing the drums so my head was bobbing like one of those bobble head dolls you put on you dash. Did he slow down when we got to town? Yea, to 80! in the middle of town. It was like driving downtown Winston during rush hour running 80. That is when I snapped. I ask my student if she knew any bad words in Chinese, she looked at me and said bad "words"? I said, yes, like Hell. She started to laugh, and told me what it was in Chinese and I told her to tell the taxi driver that I said to "SLOW THE HELL DOWN!" Of course by now she is laughing so hard she can hardly breath and we are almost to our stop. I told her that if he ever came to pick me up again I would walk before riding with him, that I would NEVER forget what he looked like and would NEVER get in a car with him again. By then she is bent over laughing and I am laughing too, hysterical, OMG, laughing on my part.
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