Late at night, the streets here form a virtual sea of taxis, leaving little space for other cars. They are similar in shape to New York taxis; however, the ones in Hong Kong are color-coded depending on the places where they will travel. The ones I take are painted red on the bottom and white around the window. The paint and boxy shape of the car makes the taxi stand out without the help of the signs labeling it as a taxi in both English and Chinese.

Our taxi adventure begins the minute my friends and I decide we want to go home. We have discovered that it is much more cost-effective to bargain with the taxi driver instead of paying the metered rate, so we first must figure out where we are relative to the university. Then it becomes much easier to decide on how much we are willing to pay.

We then walk into the street full of taxis and begin to bargain with the many drivers who are competing with each other. This is often a challenge since I am usually out with international students that do not speak Chinese well. We often find ourselves walking away from the driver simply because we cannot understand. It can also be a challenge if we are not all Asian, and the taxi drivers are not always so yielding when they realize that we are not locals.

After we find a taxi, we all jump into the car for a ride that is memorable, to say the least. The taxi drivers drive as fast as they can to get us out of the car and get more paying customers into the car. Having realized that taxi drivers are the scariest chauffeurs around, I refuse to sit in the front seat.

Instead, I am often in back next to one of the windows so that I may watch the world pass by at lightning pace. When I look out the window I often see other cars being passed in a semi-blur. The car swerves about in jerky movements, and we all tumble from side to side when the drivers turn corners. A few people even consider the taxi similar to flying home because they feel that we get home so fast for being in a car in Hong Kong traffic. I have seen my life flash before my eyes a few times when the driver seems to lose control of the car.

Inside the car, there is barely room for three people in the back and one person in the front. The seats are vinyl, and the dashboard has a meter that displays red digital numbers listing the price we would have paid if we hadn’t bargained. On the left hand corner, there is a stand with a picture and a name of the taxi driver on white laminated paper.

The taxi driver sits on the right. Most of the drivers are middle-aged or older men. It is rare to find a young driver and even rarer to find a female driver.

Taxi drivers often like to talk to us. They usually converse with whoever can understand Cantonese and the conversation can get fairly lively. On occasion the taxi driver will try to keep up with our conversations in English. The first time I ever took a taxi, the driver surprised me by speaking fluently in English and then proceeding to teach us a Chinese counting song.

As we approach our university the conversation always turns into directions to get to our places of residence. Since much of the campus goes unexplored due to its size, we do not always know where every single road goes.

On more than one occasion both the taxi driver and my friends have been very disoriented trying to direct our way through the maze of roads. When this happens, the taxi driver becomes incredibly quiet as he concentrates on figuring out where he is.

No matter how lost we get on campus, someone always sees a road sign and remembers the way home. By the end of the night and the taxi trip we are sleepy and thankful to be dropped off at our doorstep. These taxi rides have been, by far, one of the most adventurous experiences I have had in Hong Kong.

Ariel Ringlein is a junior in management from Guthrie Center. She is in Hong Kong for the semester as part of the ISU study abroad program.