2002-11-12 - 2:04 p.m.

Rip-off

I've been in China for about 48 hours at this point and I'm still not quite sure what to make of it. Lily was quite right when she said that people stare at foreigners - just walking down the street we get these unbelieving stares from the passerby, like we are the carriers of some horrible disease that has made our skin all pale and our eyes unslanted. Don't get too close! It might be contageous!

Anyway, the hotel in Shanghai was very nice, and I got to have sex with the second meanest judge in Diaryland Survivor! Twice! It was great, especially after the long layover. Heh, I said layover.

My entries are probably going to sound a lot different since I can't spellcheck them here, sitting in this internet cafe.

Anyway, on my first full day in China we had a couple of unpleasant experiences, both of them sort-of our fault.

We took a taxi from the hotel to the bus station with the idea of taking a bus to Nanjing, where Lily is going to school. However, as we were pulling up to the bus station we were waylaid by this guy who offered to drive us to Nanjing by taxi for a little less than twice what the bus would cost. The main attraction was that the bus would take 4 hours, but the mainiac cab would only take 2 1/2. So, we said okay, let's take the cab.

In retrospect, that was a very dumb idea. We wound up getting ripped off by the cab driver, but it could haev been much, much worse. First, we found out that we were going to have to pay for the tolls. That was going to cost another 100 kuai (about $12.50 American) well, okay, that's acceptable. The we found out that the guy was not going to drop us off at Nanjing University, but rather at the bus station, so we were going to have to take another taxi. We weren't happy about it, but what could we do? This guy was from Shanghai and didn't know his way about Nanjing. At the bus station the guy hit us up for gas money before letting us get our luggage back. He was polite and apologetic about it, but it's clear we were getting screwed.

Well, it was a lesson learned - just because you're in China it doesn't mean that city slickers aren't going to try to rip you off. In retrospect I can't believe that we went with this guy, who was obviously not a real cabbie - in New York I'd never dream of doing such a thing.

However, we did get to Nanjing much earlier than we would have ordnarily, so that was a bonus, but we immediatly ran into our second unhappy experience of the day. Last time I related how I stupidly left my travellers cheques at home, but I mentioned that this was not too worrysome because we could still get cash from our ATM card adn my credit cards. However when we tried to get money from the ATM card we had two machines reject us. So we went to a Bank of China where, after a couple of phone calls, the guy there said that the card was being rejected at the American end of things and we needed to get in touch with our American bank.

Swell. So I just got some money out of one of my credit cards.

Getting in touch with my American bank was no easy task, because for starters they were 13 hours out of sync with us and everything was shut down. Even more annoying was the fact that they didn't have a 1-800 number for us to call so we were going to have to get a phone card and spend more money to get this straightened out. Via email, I was able to get in touch with The Manger back in the states, and he reminded me that it would have been futile anyway - it's Veterans' Day and all the banks were closed.

In spite of these irritations I'm still very excited about being in China. That evening Lily took me out to eat Hot Pot, which is s style of eating where a huge pot is boiling in front of you at your table and you cook things in there yourself, incidentally making your own soup. It was quite yummy.

By the way, I'm a lot less impressed with Nanjing than with Shanghai. The latter seems like an urban boomtown with gleaming neon spires everywhere while Nanjing seems like a big city a little down on its luck, like Frown Town. Well, tomorrow we'll go exploring in more detail.