Bad omens??

Last Tuesday morning, I found it nearly impossible to get a taxi. There had been some overnight rain, but it had stopped (getting taxis in the rain is even harder here than in most other countries, sometimes next-to-impossible); so, there was no obvious reason why there should be a shortage of cabs; and I was setting out at 9am, when the worst of the rush hour is abating.

In fact, there was no great shortage of cabs. At least 4 or 5 of them - with their 'For Hire' lights on, no fares on board - cruised past me, refusing to stop. Driver No. 246616 pulled away as I was opening his door (I'd managed to catch him at a set of traffic lights), an extremely aggressive and dangerous thing to do. I've reported the bastard to the Taxi Supervision Bureau, but I don't suppose it will do any good.

It took me a full half hour before I finally got a cab - and even then, I think the guy was reluctant to take me. I had caught him as he was dropping off a fare, managed to jump in so quickly he didn't have a chance to drive away or protest that he was going off duty. Instead he feigned elaborate ignorance of where I wanted to go, hoping, perhaps, that I would lose confidence in him and cut the ride short. I didn't. I just toughed it out, and gave him detailed directions along the way.

Now, I try not to get too paranoid about episodes like this. I try to be open to other possible explanations. Maybe it was just an exceptional run of bad luck. Maybe the drivers who refused to stop for me were going off duty after working all night (that does tend to happen quite a bit). Maybe a lot of them had brought passengers in from the suburbs (more than normal, because of the rainy weather earlier in the morning), and were then eager to return to their regular patch and so avoiding picking up any city centre fares. That's possible, I suppose.

But that evening, 2 or 3 other foreigners told me they'd had a similar experience that morning. I didn't hear any Chinese people making similar complaints.

And, of course, Monday's papers were full of reports of the weekend's anti-foreigner protests. Cab-drivers seem to be particularly susceptible to shifts in the tide of media propaganda (when I first visited in the mid-90s, the British were getting a hard time because of the negotiations over the handover of Hong Kong; luckily for me, Clinton had just begun to try to link approval of China's WTO membership to improvements in human rights, so it was the Americans who were being vilified in the Chinese press, and the grudge against us Brits was temporarily forgotten - although I did find quite a few taxi drivers who tried to avoid taking me, until I was able to convince them I wasn't American). So, I think, on Tuesday morning they all hated us - us nasty, critical Westerners.

By Tuesday evening, they'd got over it again.

However, there is another cycle of protests scheduled (only in this country, surely, would "spontaneous popular demonstrations" be scheduled) for the May Day holiday. I think I'll try to avoid having to take a cab anywhere the second half of this week.