It's getting a little disturbing how many of my blog posts are about taxi drivers, but here's another one.
I was fascinated by the different tenor of taxi driver complaints in the US and Portugal. In New York, it's the long 12-hour shifts, the afternoon rides to the airport, or destinations in the outer boroughs. In Lisbon, the complaint was that my hotel was too near the airport. Apparently the driver had waited for 2 hours in line to pick someone up at the airport only to get me who's hotel was 8 km away. According to him, taxi drivers in Portugal are only allowed to make 5 pick ups a day, so it sucked for my driver to use up one of his on such a short haul.
I'm prone to feeling terrible about this kind of thing and compensating with absurd tips (which I did) and I know I'm easily manipulated by the plight of the service industry but I'm sort of okay with that.
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