so bad at getting a taxi

Ok, I’m jumping ahead to tell you how insanely bad we are at getting a taxi in Dublin.

This is something you don’t necessarily think about — the protocol for hailing a cab in another country. I’m used to clicking a button on my phone and a car rolling up to my house to get me. We can’t do anything like that here because a) no Uber or Lyft here and b) there is a taxi app but we don’t have local (in country) mobile numbers so we can't use it.

Recent times we’ve tried to get a cab:

You recall the morning we tried to go to the airport to get our rental and our cabbie didn’t show up. Jason and Sara walked around the block and found one.

Coming back into Dublin from our tour of the country, we tried to call the awesome driver who took us to the car rental at the airport when we first got our car. He gave us his card and said to call or text. We did both — and also whatsapp’d And nothing ever happened...that we can tell. Sara’s phone was working with a local SIM card...but we couldn’t get through. Mom has free data but we couldn’t get through. We did crack ourselves up thinking about how many wrong numbers we must have texted trying to figure it all out. It’s no wonder no random person didn’t want to come pick us up with a text like, “Hey, its the 5 crazy Americans...can you come get us?” So, we finally asked the Enterprise car rental guy to call us a cab and he said he could but it would take 20-25 minutes and instead we could ride their free shuttle to terminal 1 which drops at the taxi stand. Perfect! Except it took at least 20 minutes to get on the free shuttle and then it dropped us at a taxi stand with a long line. Sheesh. We’re used to taxi stands with long lines of cabs waiting for people — not the other way around!

So, now we’re trying to find one in Dublin to take us to Guinness. We’re not sure how to get one to pull over. We tried a few things. Nothing happened. We moved to a less busy road. No luck. Finally, Jason walked through traffic and asked a cab driver who pulled over for us. Yeah! We asked him what to do in the future and he said to put your thumb out like a hitchhiker. Ok, no problem.

Well, next cab needed we did the thumb trick and not one single cab would pull over. Granted, we were trying to flag down all cabs, including those that already had people in them. We couldn’t tell this until they were right upon us, in our defense. We never could get a cab so we ended up walking from lunch to the whiskey distillery through a couple of churches. Hey, why not?

After whiskey tasting, we really needed a cab. Jason asked the distillery staff to call us one. They had a button they pushed! Bam! Easy! So we went outside to wait. A few minutes later one pulled up, and we all got in.

Nope.

Turns out, he was there for someone else. We had to get out.

OMG.

So then some other groups were outside and we all had these numbers — a cab pulled up and we were all trying to figure out if it was ours or not. The cab driver said no to all our numbers but then told us to get in. We were so confused but who cared?

We asked him how to hail a cab and he said just stick your arm out. Hmmm. Ok. We’ll try it again, I suppose!

So, even when we have a direct #, we can’t get a cab. Even standing in the taxi line, we can’t. Even hailing it the way to cab drivers said to. Even when it arrives and we get it, we have to get out.

We suck at this.