Word: taxied
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Even when streets do have names, few know what they are. My girlfriend recently saw an official map of her hometown?Masaya, Nicaragua?and discovered that the street where she had grown up in fact has a name: Calle Palo Blanco. But if you tell a taxi driver "Calle Palo Blanco," all you will get is a blank stare. So we still give the more common address ("From the San Jeronimo Shell Station, 2 1/2 blocks down"). And off we go without further question...
Were you stunned by the reception? No. George and I actually thought it was a bit of a scream. We all went to Britain and there was tremendous reaction. I can remember walking across the street and a London taxi stopped and the taxi driver - he was a tough-looking cookie - came out and said "You're Hillary, aren't you?" And I said "Yeah." And he said, "Congratulations. You know you've done a great job for us!" He got back in his cab and drove of. Now, the contrast was when we arrived back here in New Zealand...
...readies for a tactical, corkscrew landing and I can see the glowing grids of the U.S. detention center on the far side of the airport below. From around 5,000 feet in the air, just past dusk, it is one of the brightest structures anywhere in sight. We land, taxi, deplane and spill out into the darkness. The highway at night is empty, wide and pitch-black. After nearly five years it is still unsecured, still dubbed the "highway of death." In some cases checkpoints are every couple of hundred yards. Wide boulevards where children once played soccer have been...
...journalists still had parties and friends would pass out in the bushes and lived to tell of it. I enjoyed taking taxis at night. Today taking a public taxi during the day as a western journalist is tantamount to a death wish. Back then there was an overabundance of satellite dishes - these big metal pans - for sale at nearly every shop. Today commerce has slowed to a crawl. The traffic now is a bit more orderly, but the number of horse-drawn carts has increased. Fancy cars are all but absent. And everyone is on edge - get too close...
...Across from Detroit in Windsor, Ont. - at Canada's busiest border crossing - the plumped-up loonie did not bring such good humor. Windsor is one of the few urban centers in Canada - almost all of them in Ontario - where unemployment has risen since 2002. Gurmit Singh Bains drives his taxi along the riverside. "It's like a ghost town," he says. "The whole economy is down: hotels, restaurants, everything." The waterfront DaimlerChrysler Canada headquarters opened to much fanfare there in 2002, when the city's auto-manufacturing industry was red-hot. Today, the building's cavernous ground-floor retail space...