Terribly Terrible Taxi Drivers

Day 3 of 11, and sad to say, in my eyes Manila has not redeemed itself.

Most of my disappointment has to do with the taxis.. Readers be warned: Manila taxi drivers do not know Manila streets.. as in, they get lost very often and even the taxi drivers have to ask the police, people on the way, etc to get to the destination. We've taken taxi 4 times, to various destinations, and each time the driver did not know the way. Go figure. Plus, once I saw a taxi with a Phillipina lady stopping by the side of the road, and then both passenger and driver were talking to a policeman and pointing around, asking which way to go.

Wait, there's something worse. The drivers did not actually tell us that they did not know how to go!! It was like, "We want to go Santtillian street" "Sure" but after a few meters the driver would start mumbling to himself, then stopping by and asking people. And what's worse (yes it's just gonna get "badder and badder" from here...) is that you have to bargain for the taxi, even if they had put the meter on... Yep you read that right... So here's my story...

Was going to meet up with a friend in a hostel, and flagged down a taxi. "Do you know how to go to Saint Illian street?"
"Yes.."
Got in to the taxi, driver said, "What street did you say again?"
"Saint Ilian"
"Hm... mumble mumble.. I think I need to ask people, you know..."
"Oh. Ok." *thinking, whatever lah, as long as I get there, and luckily I wasn't in a hurry*
Driver asked," So, how much you want to pay..?"
Me: "Huh?"
Driver: "Because I need to ask around you know.. what about this, 200 pesos?"
This time, it hit me that he was asking me to pay more, probably because we would need to go round and round..
Me: "But you have the meter. It is still running, doesn't matter if we need to ask around."
Driver: "Hah...meter... hah..." *His face was like, 'who are you kidding man..what's the point of using meter..'
Me: "Never mind. Drop me now please, just at the side of the road over there."
Driver: "ok ok, what about like this, you pay 100 pesos?"
At this point I was just super-pissed that I insisted he dropped me at the side of the road, but in the end I agreed to add 20 pesos to whatever price is on the meter, which was 60 pesos. 20 pesos is about 80 singapore cents, and being someone brought up in a well-to-do family, in normal situations I would just pay whatever price is named, since the money would mean much more to the other person than to me. Well, I was just pissed and wanted to piss the taxi driver as well...

Later that night, I took another taxi with some friends, and this time, the taxi driver, again, said he knew where we wanted to go, and agreed to put the meter on, but ended up going round and round, stopping so often to read a map we brought, and speaking to us in Tagalog in a very patronizing tone that in the end I just wanted to strangle the guy.. I even suspected that he pretended not to understand English just so he could go around and charged us higher. (We were kinda directing him since we somewhat know the layout of this part of the city already)

When we got down from the car my friends had to chill me huhuhu... Went to get some drink, and while I was drinking a can of cold beer to cool down (I admit this had to do with my temper that time, the afternoon taxi incident passed through my mind, and I thought, "Wait a minute.. that guy wanted to charge me more because he needed to go around asking which way to go... he WANTED ME TO PAY MORE BECAUSE HE CANNOT DO HIS JOB???! WTH??!"

So yeah. Well I'm sure Manila cannot be judged just from the quality of its taxi drivers, but for now on, I am very negatively biased towards this city. 8 more days to go, let's see.