I’m utterly convinced that whoever designed the arcade game ‘Crazy Taxi‘ (which was pretty popular in the late 1990s) must have been a veteran Chinese traveller. On the night we got back to Chengdu, a few of us decided to attend a musical revue of local theatrical specialities, which included Sichuan opera, puppetry, fire breathing, instrumental performances, and face-changing (which I’ll explain shortly). In order to get us to the venue on time, the taxi driver did all of the following at least once: making wild u-turns in the middle of intersections, driving with two tires on the sidewalk, navigating a congested street by turning down a fenced-off bike lane, laying on the horn and essentially playing chicken with on-coming vehicles of various sizes, accelerating to twice the posted speed limit, cutting across pedestrian streets, and driving on the wrong side of busy streets by swerving between on-coming cars. Nothing like the invigorating rush of impending doom to whet one’s appetite for theatre!
Aside: face-changing is an indigenous speciality of Sichuan opera, which requires the actors to use various tricks in order to switch between masks nearly instantaneously. On the bus ride to Emei, our tour guide had explained some of these techniques, which demystified the proceedings a bit. If she hadn’t, I would have been absolutely bamboozled trying to figure it out. While I’m sure that this theatrical tradition would have greater effect within its original context, the five minute face-changing routine that we saw was still quite impressive, though I’d say that my favourite of the acts was an incredibly accomplished shadow puppeteer.
[...] turned and said that he’d do his best to get us to the station on time. In addition to pulling many of the stunts I’d seen in Chengdu, this fellow’s primary modus operandi was simply to drive like a maniac: we barreled through [...]