Life With The Lindsays - HELP!

Meet the Lindsays - the family who took me in and adopted me for 2 weeks, took me on trips to Guilin, Yangshuo, and Xi'an, and helped me to become acclimatised to China in the best possible way... by being totally pampered!

They introduced me to my first ever PEDICURE (results shown in picture may not seem as spectacular as they are in real life), dinner parties and WESTERN style restuarants(with Wara and Olivia - center), Starbucks morning with the ladies of the SWIC (Shenzhen International Women's Club), the complimentary golf cart that transports you up the hill to the house if you've ingested too much Frappuccino to be able to walk under your own steam, and last but not least...trips to Luo-Hu for some serious (fake) retail therapy... not that I condone that sort of thing... it's very wrong...bad Marisa...BAAAAD! But one can always look. :)

Unfortunately, the stay with them also made it absolutely clear that I need to learn a little more Chinese in order to be able to efficiently and safely navigate this awesome country. Olivia and I went to a local theme park called Windows On The World - where iconic landmarks from around the world are recreated in miniature. I wonder if my visits to the mini Taj Mahal, the Pyramids and Mount Rushmore count and if I can therefore cross off Agra, Cairo and ? from my to-do list? Or would this be considered cheating a tiny bit? :P But I digress...

Finished with trudging through the park at 39C heat being the attraction as much as the miniature recreations themselves (some people politely asked to take pictures with us, ruder versions just stealthily took out mobile phones and cameras to take snaps... I should charge!), we TRIED to take a taxi back to a local mall. With false confidence I'd informed Mr. Lindsay before we left that "if I can't manage to get back by taxi in Shenzhen, I have no hope of travelling rural China on my own". We'd had the foresight to ask the family driver to write down our destination in Chinese AND I was also armed with a map. How hard could it be??? Hard. Useless. Impossible.

One after another, the taxi drivers refused to take us either saying they didn't understand (riiiight), didn't want, or just took a look at us FOWAYNERS and shook their heads "no". We had to call a secretary in the company to talk to the drivers in Chinese and explain. After 1hr of failed attempts, we were finally on our way. Unfortunately, the same thing repeated itself on the way from the mall to home - drivers again refused to take us despite the fact that I had marked the location on our map, we had a business card with the address in Chinese, and it was basically a 20 minute walk straight down the same road! Of course, had we actually known it was only that far we would have walked! Instead, we had to go back to the Mall Customer Service desk where they wrote "please take me to" in Chinese on the business card and sent us back to the taxis. Hey presto - suddenly people understood and we were on our way home.

Now I ask anyone - when a person gets in a cab, shows you a map with a big cross, gives you a business card with the address, which (coincidentally!) is the same as the location marked on the map... WHAT DO YOU THINK THEY WANT? Not rocket-science, is it? Eggsactly. Wow, am I screwed or what?!

So when I saw this billboard near the house ("Empty talk endangers the nation, practical work brings prosperity"), I figured I might as well take it to heart and do something PRACTICAL - like taking an intensive Mandarin course for a month. Maybe THEN I can get a taxi to take me where I want to go! Updates to follow.