While in smaller towns in China cab drivers will allow more than 4 passengers, Beijing cabbies can be fairly strict about this rule. One evening my friends wanted to go to a bar in NLGX (南锣鼓巷) in Beijing. While getting to NLGX is no problem, from experience, I knew that trying to get a cab from NLGX at night is very difficult.

After hanging out in NLGX for a few hours we decided to meet up with some friends in SLT (三里屯). As expected, cabs were hard to come by. Additionally, there was 5 of us. Therefore, we needed two cabs. After trying and failing to get a cab for 15 minutes we started walking towards SLT. It was at this time we devised a plan for only taking one cab if we got one to stop.

No more than a minute later a taxi stopped for us and our plan was put into action. Our plan was to put one person in the trunk of the taxi without the driver knowing. It was dark outside and the cabby would see there was only 4 of us and think nothing of it. My job was to tell the driver we had a suitcase we needed to put in the trunk. Upon popping the trunk, one friend that was hiding behind a bush came running towards the car and got into the trunk. We closed the trunk and got into the car. It’s a fairly short ride from NLGX to SLT but we seemed to hit every red light.

As you can imagine we were all laughing about what was going on because the driver was clueless. Then, we got to a red light. The radio was not on and all of the sudden the taxi just went quiet. At that exact moment, the guy in the trunk says, “damn it’s hot back here!”. Since it was coming from the trunk the voice was very muffled. I was sitting in the front seat and I remember the driver turning his head in slow motion and looking towards the back seat as if to say, what the hell was that. Everyone in the car immediately started talking and making as much noise as possible so the driver would stop thinking about it.

We decided we wanted the driver to drop us in the busiest place in SLT so that everyone would be shocked to see someone emerge from the trunk. Once we got to bar street at the back of the Village in SLT, we asked the driver to pop the trunk as I paid him. Upon popping the trunk and my friend popping out of the trunk, almost in unison from 10 different Chinese was simply, 我操！