
So, when we arrived in Seminyak it was mid-afternoon. We dropped our stuff off at the hotel, and then wandered around a bit. Zoe wanted to do some shopping which took her further afield, so she flagged down a taxi (and I wandered back to the hotel to do some writing). This is when Zoe met Our Taxi Driver. I need to ask him his name again, because my memory is terrible, but I know he said it meant 'Sun'. When Zoe came back from doing her shopping she said that he was a really friendly man, and he is! So when we decided to go to a shisha restaurant place to try a bit, we rang him up (Zoe had his card) to take us there.
In the taxi we were chatting away about friends, family, his house/hotel he's building (if anyone wants an idyllic rural hideaway close to Padang Bai and various other places), and things like that. He asked us if we liked karaoke, and we said we didn't really, but somehow that descended into us singing, badly (with completely different music playing in the car) Adele, 'Rolling in the Deep', Ronan Keating (?)'s...was it Words? Baby Can I Hold You Tonight? (Is that the name of a song?) Or something else?...and various other tunes.
We got to the place and invited him in and he came along :) Clearly another person, like Jackie, who is more focussed on having a happy life than chasing money (although he is saving hard for his house-hotel).
And we chatted about many other things in the restaurant. First, with houses being so cheap here, Zoe and I's madcap scheme to come live here started sounding less madcap - and we shocked him with our talk of house prices and rent in England. We chatted about friendliness/not in different countries. Apparently when you're here in Bali and walking along and all the taxi drivers keep asking you if you want a taxi, well, 'Sun' said, "We know you don't need a taxi, we just...we're just trying to...you know...." Make a connection, chat, be friendly. I told him about my friend Vix from London who came up to Norwich and kept saying things like, "Here they keep offering to help you, and they mean it!" But I had to add that compared to Bali, Norwich was still not great. And he told a story of motorbiking I think it was on his way home, and he saw a tourist stopped under a bridge studying a map.
Sun said, "I asked him if he needed help, and he said nothing, and I thought maybe he hadn't heard me, so I asked again. And then he folded up his map and zoomed off, you know, really really fast. And then, later, I caught up and he'd had an accident. I said to him, 'You need to go to hospital', and he said 'I know', and then we called him an ambulance and we all said, 'Don't worry about your motorbike, we will leave it in one of these houses here, it will be safe.' But he didn't say anything else."
And. as the night went on, we started talking about film ideas - first Robin and I's war idea (I couldn't remember the ending I'd managed to work out - luckily I've written it down...hopefully legibly), and then Sun suggested I do a film about him, his life, or about all the people a taxi driver comes in contact with (I said a bit like 'Paris Je T'aime', or 'New York I Love You'). Then, because Sun had been talking to us about two Russian friends he had made, who he said were very attractive and only a little younger than us (we said we'd be the judge of that), we thought about 'Taxi Dating.com' - a film about a taxi driver who helps people find love - first he talks to the person looking, finds out what they want, then he trawls the roadways to find them some possibilities. (It should probably be called #taxidating, to fit with these modern times.)
Finally, at about midnight, maybe a bit later, our taxi driver took us home.
In the taxi we were chatting away about friends, family, his house/hotel he's building (if anyone wants an idyllic rural hideaway close to Padang Bai and various other places), and things like that. He asked us if we liked karaoke, and we said we didn't really, but somehow that descended into us singing, badly (with completely different music playing in the car) Adele, 'Rolling in the Deep', Ronan Keating (?)'s...was it Words? Baby Can I Hold You Tonight? (Is that the name of a song?) Or something else?...and various other tunes.
We got to the place and invited him in and he came along :) Clearly another person, like Jackie, who is more focussed on having a happy life than chasing money (although he is saving hard for his house-hotel).
And we chatted about many other things in the restaurant. First, with houses being so cheap here, Zoe and I's madcap scheme to come live here started sounding less madcap - and we shocked him with our talk of house prices and rent in England. We chatted about friendliness/not in different countries. Apparently when you're here in Bali and walking along and all the taxi drivers keep asking you if you want a taxi, well, 'Sun' said, "We know you don't need a taxi, we just...we're just trying to...you know...." Make a connection, chat, be friendly. I told him about my friend Vix from London who came up to Norwich and kept saying things like, "Here they keep offering to help you, and they mean it!" But I had to add that compared to Bali, Norwich was still not great. And he told a story of motorbiking I think it was on his way home, and he saw a tourist stopped under a bridge studying a map.
Sun said, "I asked him if he needed help, and he said nothing, and I thought maybe he hadn't heard me, so I asked again. And then he folded up his map and zoomed off, you know, really really fast. And then, later, I caught up and he'd had an accident. I said to him, 'You need to go to hospital', and he said 'I know', and then we called him an ambulance and we all said, 'Don't worry about your motorbike, we will leave it in one of these houses here, it will be safe.' But he didn't say anything else."
And. as the night went on, we started talking about film ideas - first Robin and I's war idea (I couldn't remember the ending I'd managed to work out - luckily I've written it down...hopefully legibly), and then Sun suggested I do a film about him, his life, or about all the people a taxi driver comes in contact with (I said a bit like 'Paris Je T'aime', or 'New York I Love You'). Then, because Sun had been talking to us about two Russian friends he had made, who he said were very attractive and only a little younger than us (we said we'd be the judge of that), we thought about 'Taxi Dating.com' - a film about a taxi driver who helps people find love - first he talks to the person looking, finds out what they want, then he trawls the roadways to find them some possibilities. (It should probably be called #taxidating, to fit with these modern times.)
Finally, at about midnight, maybe a bit later, our taxi driver took us home.