Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

You think you are prepared (for living overseas). You have researched. You have read. You have tapped all your friends who have been there. I will assure you now, you are in no way prepared.

There are as many ways to approach the lifestyle of a foreign diplomat as there are stars in the sky. For me the only way is to go all in. To dive headlong, for better or worse, into the chasm of the unknown. Sometimes this means rolling out the language I've managed to hobble together or by using the internationally sanctioned pantomime routine to make myself understood. Frequently the results of either approach are quite funny and frustrating at the same time. Other times, no amount of pantomime or attempt to overcome language barriers is enough. Fortunately, we live in a digital age.

We had our first official function as part of the consulate community here on Sunday. It was a "Hail and Farewell" - in layman's speak an opportunity to come together as a community and wish old friends good luck in their onward assignments and a chance to meet the newcomers that have just recently arrived at post. As you can likely imagine, it is a bittersweet affair.

The event had been arranged to be held at a restaurant at the edge of a beautiful lake that completely disappears during the dry months and returns to lush glory in the monsoon season. As with many things here, it was difficult to find. But we are stalwart folk and had decided that we could make our own way there to join the festivities. Armed with a nifty phone app that would allow us to summon a taxi to our location, we were confident that this should be no issue.

We were wrong.

Now to fully appreciate one of the major challenges that we face as nomads, I should explain that when a new officer arrives they are usually provided the phone and accompanying phone number of the person that they replaced. In this digital age this presents a problem because that number has been associated with various accounts from the previous officer including things like cable, and in this case taxi accounts. Fortunately, we had already taken the necessary steps to equip me with my own cellular account. Since we could not figure out how to change the taxi account set up with my husband's phone we just set up a new one tied to my phone. Easy, right?

Nope.

But once we went through the necessary machinations to get the account set up, we figured we were good to go. Not quite. Apparently this taxi service has a nifty feature whereby using the location of the cell phone a taxi is summoned to your exact location - The fourth floor of an apartment building that appears to be on one street, but whose entrance is on an entirely different and unconnected street was not especially helpful. This was easily resolved by going to the entrance of the building complex and repeating the process of summoning a cab. Terrific! Even better, the cab company immediately responded with a text notifying us not only that our cab was en route, but the description of the vehicle, the license number and the name of the driver! Pretty cool. And that is where the problem began.

Already behind schedule because of the various technology issues we had faced that morning, we got into the newly arrived cab (my husband got in the front seat and I got in the back) and provided the address to which we needed to go. My husband and I are still unclear as to whether the driver actually spoke English - albeit too fast for our western ears to discern, or if he only spoke Telegu (one of the local Indian dialects). What happened next was akin to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.  (For those of my friends who do not herald from the States, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is a Disneyland Theme Park Ride in Anaheim, California and is a sort of homage to the children's book The Wind in the Willows, written by Kenneth Grahame).

Now we had both seen various movies and YouTube videos displaying the organized chaos that is traffic in our new city, but it was an entirely different experience to be inside a wheeled metal box careening through the streets and trying to avoid other cars, motorcycles that literally appear out of nowhere, tuk tuks (think motorized rickshaw) and pedestrians diving between all of the aforementioned vehicles. Combine this with a driver who did not seem entirely certain where we going and repeated consulted various cell phones, including my own and you might imagine the scene was a little stressful. Suddenly our driver announced that location was just behind us and that he would drop us off. We paid, exited the vehicle with assurances that the restaurant was on the road just behind us and he drove off.

To our driver's credit, his cab was clean and comfortable, and he was friendly - there was just one problem. We were, we discovered by means of a call to another officer, at least 2 kilometers from where we were supposed to be! The other challenge? My cellphone had not gotten a full charge and what with all the use of navigation apps, etc was rapidly dying.

Using the handy-dandy new taxi app we summoned yet another taxi. This time, however, we had the added challenge of not actually being at a specific location but we're standing in the midst of a market street. Again came the text message notifying us of the impending arrival of the cab and the pertinent details. Almost immediately my phone rang and in Telegu came the inquiry as to "where are you?"...at least that is what I think he said. I gave the name of the store we were standing in front of and a moment later the taxi stopped to pick us up. As we jumped in the cab, so as not to impede traffic any longer than necessary, I noticed that my husband had gotten in the back seat with me. A little sheepishly he declared, "I won't be doing that again." I think being that close to the "action" was even a little much for my sweet husband whose first word's upon entering the German Autobahn, where he had learned to drive, was "Yeehaaaaw."

There is nothing like the feeling of being lost in a foreign country, in a cab you are paying for and no one speaks English.  Worse, you and the driver don’t know where you are supposed to go.  Fortunately, one of the employees at the restaurant hosting the event played interpreter and provide the much needed directions. It should be noted that even with those directions, the remainder of our journey included at least two wrong turns and a complete U-turn.

We did eventually arrive safely at our destination, albeit over an hour late. We are wiser for the experience. This lifestyle teaches you many things, perhaps the most important of which is patience and flexibility. I was reminded of a quote from one of my favorite movies about India, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in which Sonny says, "Everything will be all right in the end... if it's not all right then it's not yet the end" (2011). I guess Sonny was right, another officer and his wife gave us a lift home - and everything was all right.