“I Speak Uber”
Our very first time in an Uber… exciting!
A few days ago we wanted to go to the Pavlovsk & Catherine Palace. We were looking into our options and we only had 2 options: public transport or taxi/uber. As the public transportation system would take at least two hours transit time, we went for the uber system.
Installing the app and creating a profile was easy, and attaching my paypal account was easy as well. However when we tried requesting the car for the first ride, it went wrong. We got the following detailed error message: “something went wrong” :-). Turns out: attaching my visa card to my profile fixed the problem.
It works like this: you indicate where you want to be
picked up or you indicate “my location” and your destination place. You
immediately see a number of cars pop up on your screen and a few minutes later
you get a proposal.
For the first ride (1h drive) we got a quote of around 900 rubles (+- 15
euros), what seemed too cheap to be true. It’s very convenient that you can see the rating of
the driver they propose, how much experience he have, the price and how long it
will take before the car is there to pick you up. It’s almost unbelievable how fast a driver can be there to pick you up. We really had to hurry to escape our hotel from the second floor to catch our driver that would be at the front gate in 5 minutes. Another advantage is that
when you confirm the booking you can see the license plate and the car brand
although for a women like Pinky it would be easier to know the colour of the car instead of
the brand 🙂
Driving style?
Well you have “ to keep calm, carry on and think happy thoughts” as sometimes they make sharp turns, squeeze in the traffic but generally speaking you feel safe (mainly because this is the driving style of everyone in Russia).
For us this
experience was extra adventurous as we do not speak Russian and we were
wondering how that would work out… Quite well we have to admit, the driver can
perfectly perform his assignment without any verbal communication.
Of course we just had to try it anyway with following results:
Ride 1:
Me: Do you speak English?
Driver: Nods no
– Silence for remainder of ride –
Ride 2:
Me: Do you speak English?
Driver: Yes
– Silence for remainder of ride –
Ride 3:
Me: Do you speak English?
Driver: I only speak Uber
– Silence for remainder of ride –
Overall we were very happy with the Uber experience, although we are a little flabbergasted about the low fares. We can only hope the drivers still earn enough money to make a descent living.