A short walk from the Temporary Apartment today, after I'd returned from a meeting across town.
It was one of those occasions where I'd given the address to a taxi driver and had a feeling that I might be being taken in the wrong direction. Its like the London equivalent of Finsbury Park and Finsbury Square.
I'm fairly used to these little misunderstandings in certain foreign taxis and have some interesting reference journeys as well as improved renegotiation skills.
There's the time we were around Istanbul with a clearly lost taxi driver and improvised a Sat Nav on a laptop to find our location and the direction. That was before his taxi broke down on the bridge into Asia and we had to explain what we were doing to some armed soldiers.
Or the time in Riyadh when the taxi driver just kept saying 'Yes' but clearly didn't understand anything we were saying let alone knowing the way to the American Express office.
How things move on; on this occasion I could simply switch on my Blackberry, flip to Google Maps, show where we were and then point to the place I was supposed to be heading.
"Ah", said the taxi driver, with his own two separate sat-nav systems (one with the taxi system and another built into the Merc) as he recognised the location from my finger pointing, whilst being unable to recognise it from my handwritten address(kerching?).
I really should do something about my handwriting.
Sent from a handheld device.
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