Taxi Driver #2

So when we first arrived in Bulgaria Jeff wrote a funny post about a somewhat crazy taxi driver we had one evening entitled, "Taxi Driver #1."  We expected to have many more taxi drivers to talk about but for the most part all the drivers we've had have been courteous and friendly.  Until this evening.

Margaret, a friend of my coworker, Lindsay, arrived in Sofia tonight and seeing as how I was the only international staff on campus, I went to greet her at the gate (you have to have a gate pass to get in and she doesn't have one yet).  Lindsay will be arriving later tonight.

Anyway, when the taxi pulled up to the gate I expected Margaret to pay, jump out, get her bags, and we would be on our way back onto campus.  But instead it looked like she and the taxi driver were arguing.  Did she forget to get leva at the airport?  Did she not have enough?  Finally, she stepped out of the car and said, "Are you Shannon? I'm Margaret.  He's charging me 37 lv for this ride and I don't have enough money."  I was dumbfounded!  It costs no more than 8 lv to get from the airport to campus.  This is when I realized that this was not OK Taxi (the reliable and trustworthy company that we always use).  And according to the sign on his window, he charges 4.99 lv for every km.  This is absurd!

So we argued with him - me saying it should only be 8 lv, Margaret saying she would pay 15 lv if he would just give her bags to her (they were in the trunk), him saying it's his company and that's what he charges and he would call the police.  He wouldn't budge.  Grr.  I hadn't brought any cash with me to meet her, so she finally convinced him that if he would take her to an ATM she would pay 30 lv.  What a rip off!  So off they went.

When they got back about 10 minutes later she got out of the car and said, "I'm really sorry to do this to you Shannon, but the ATM wouldn't take my card, so can I borrow 10 lv?"  Poor thing!  What a terrible welcome to this country (although she had been here before). So I ran back to my house, grabbed some cash, and ran back to Margaret and the taxi driver (probably took me more than 5 minutes - it's a bit of a distance from the gate).  I gave her a ten, she had 15, the driver demanded 30 and finally accepted the 2 American dollars she had in her wallet.  We both told him how rude this was, what a rip-off it was, how if he had just accepted the 15 in the first place he could have gotten other fairs already, and finally, how he made an incredibly poor welcome to foreigners here. His response was, "It's not my problem."  Jackass.

The sad thing about this is that Margaret was well-prepared for this.  Lindsay had given her enough cash for a snack and a cab ride from the airport.  She had instructed her to only take OK Taxi and to beware of impostors.  Margaret even asked the person helping her to the taxi if it was OK Taxi and he said yes.  The truth was that the O in OK had a slash in it and they were called Softrans instead of Supertrans (in Cyrillic of course: софтранс vs. супертранс - how is someone who doesn't read Cyrillic supposed to tell the difference?!?).  In fact, their phone number was off by only one digit from OK's phone number.  So having only been here once before, having been told this was OK Taxi, and, I suppose, believing that people are inherently good, Margaret got in and didn't think to look at the price. And paid a price for the corruption that is so common in this country.

So, to finish this story, we love OK Taxi and really hate those nasty impostors.  Here is a good description of how to tell the real OK Taxi from the fake ones (especially at the airport) by our friend Carolyn http://karolinkabulgaria.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/yeah-o-k-taxi/.  This will be especially useful to anyone who might be traveling here.

We'd heard about this sort of bad experience with the taxis here, but until this evening had not had the pleasure of actually having one of these experiences.

Welcome to Bulgaria, Margaret.  I hope the rest of your stay is much more pleasant.