Quick Tip: A Picture’s Worth…

In Asia, getting help to find all those places you want to visit is difficult when you don’t read or speak the language. The saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words, and in a country where you don’t know how to say a thousand words, that picture can be even more valuable. When you arrive at your destination’s airport, make a quick detour to the gift shop and pick up a few postcards of the places you’d like visit and let the pictures do your talking. Quite often the name of the place is printed in the local language on the back.

While in a gift shop in Hong Kong, I found a postcard of a place that I wanted to see. Even though I’m Chinese, I don’t really speak Chinese and understand very little, so trying to tell a taxi driver where I wanted to go would have been a huge challenge. Fortunately, I showed the driver the postcard I bought. He knew where it was, but said it was far away and would take a long time to drive there. He did take me there and on the way I even managed to tell him in my broken Chinese to wait to take me back.

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