Three small transportation stories

Online booking
I booked a flight “online” yesterday for a trip to Xi’an for next weekend. I used Ctrip.com, the equivalent of Orbitz or Expedia in the US. For the booking process, everything proceeded fairly normally at first. I sorted through a bunch of options, chose my flights and proceeded to booking. Then the payment choices came up. The choices were: (1) pay with a Chinese credit card, or (2) pay cash. I of course had to choose cash, both because I do not have a Chinese credit card and because I needed to see how that would work. I got to choose a two-hour window during the next day during which a Ctrip representative would come to my office and we would make an exchange. Sure enough, he brought me a paper ticket and I paid him in cash.

Error Messages
One of the best Chinese phrasings I have seen. An error message when searching for a flight:

Shanghai - Diqing None of direct flights in this time.

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If you can accept the way turn in other airports,The following is the Shanghai that we recommend for you to fly to the Diqing of in turn(onward flight) the flight path.Please choose you feel quite the cheese in turn the city, we will search the service for you

Taxis
I have written before about how difficult it is to take taxis here. It is such a problem that I will write again. First, it is almost impossible to pronounce the address of where you want to go, and taxi drivers never understand what you are saying. So Westerners need to bring a Chinese map and the address written in Chinese of wherever they want to go. But even so, it is still a big question of whether you will actually get where you are going. I have heard a few reasons for that – one being that many taxi drivers don’t read that well, and the other being that since entire areas of town can be seized, torn down, and rebuilt, the landscape changes so fast that taxi drivers can’t keep up. Whatever the case, it is a huge pain to take a taxi anywhere and at all times I keep a Chinese map of my hotel in my pocket and still often don’t get exactly where I want to go.

But, last night I got into a cab after dinner and reached into my pocket. Somehow I did not have my map with me. So we went through a two minute exchange where I tried to say Xujiahui (pronounced something like shoe-jah-hway) and the cab driver stared blankly at me. Finally, he said “Ah! Xujiahui” (to me, exactly the same as I had been saying for two minutes) and off we went. Xujiahui is the metro station about 10 minutes from my hotel and the only landmark I know. We successfully made it to the metro station and then I was able to point and grunt and guide us to the hotel. A huge victory!