Gas in China

I know my posting has been a little lackadaisical lately, but it should be back to normal very soon. For now, I leave you with this:

And a little back story... two of my coworkers and I got a taxi from the train station in Nanjing to go to work today after our work meeting in Shanghai. It was very easy to get a taxi today (completely unusual...). The first one we got in, we told the driver where we wanted to go and he agreed. So we pull up maybe 100 yards, and there was a policeman watching the traffic leave the train station. He stopped our driver, said something to him in Chinese. They argued back and forth a few minutes, then he opened the passenger side front door and reached in to his taxi license plaque on the dashboard, said some more Chinese, then ripped it off the dashboard. These things are like screwed in. None of us knew what was going on, we just had a bad feeling about that so we quickly got out of that taxi and into a different one. 

The second driver needed to stop at the gas station, which was another interesting experience. I haven't been to a gas station here. But apparently the gas tank is in the hood of the car. There's also an attendant that pumps gas for you. Our driver insisted we all get out of the car at the gas station... not sure why, but we did it anyway. Luckily he didn't drive off and leave us there.

Oh China.