萝卜's Essential Chinese Characters #2
大家好！
Hello again for another round of essential Chinese characters! When I was in China, we took a lot of taxis. They’re everywhere, reasonably priced, and fast. While you can call for a ride-share type service using a Chinese navigational app like 高德地图 (I like to read it as “above average maps" XD), it’s usually pretty convenient to just hail one on the street. How do you know which ones are available though? I’ll tell you how, you read the sign! Here’s what you need to know:
空车 (kōngchē) – literally “empty car”, meaning it’s available!
有客 (yǒukè) – literally “have guest/customer”, meaning you should catch the next one!
The funny thing about this is that while these two phrases seem to be fairly universal, the colors they show up as differ from location to location. So while in Chengdu 空车 is in red (see the picture), and 有客 is in green, these colors were flipped in other cities! So there’s no easy catch-all in terms of colors, you do have to read!
I felt a bit weird taking pictures of active taxis while abroad, so I just found the above picture online (source). This taxi looks a bit older, though it still has the classic green of Sichuan!
See you next time! 下次见！
P.S. Fun fact about license plates in China: the first two characters refer to the province and city where the car was registered. So in the above picture, you can see that this license plate is 川A meaning that it is from Sichuan (四川) city "A", which in this case is the capital Chengdu! It's quite fun looking at the cars driving around and see where everyone has come from, especially during a holiday time like Chinese New Year!
