The most emailed article on nytimes.com the past couple of days was the article on Beijing’ seemingly Sisyphean effort on chinglish, queuing, and spitting in time for the 2008 Olympics. The city is on a rampage to educate folks about changing these bad habits, even going as far as designating an official “Queuing Day.” The efforts are indeed earnest, but these are the sort of habits that have been practiced for generations and are hard to break in just one year.
It hit us once we got off the airport bus that China was going to offer an experience like no other. Sure every country is unique in their own right, but I’ve yet to see anything like China and China probably hasn’t seen much of people like me and Karen.
As the locals all tell us, we look Chinese, but we don’t speak Chinese. My laoxing, that’s because we’re Chinese with roots in Hong Kong and Guangzhou (Canton), and most of all we’re American. We just left the part about Americans out. The Putonghau speaking set seem to understand that us and the rest of the Cantonese speakers probably struggle somewhat with Mandarin. We didn’t just struggle, we just didn’t speak it except the Pimsleur phrase, “wo bu hui shuo putonghua.” Yeah, that comes in real handy.
Upon descending the bus, we and the everyone who was on were swarmed by hawkers and hustlers trying to make some cash off the tourists. Who knew that these folks do not take no for an answer. I gotta give it to these folks, they sure are persistent. I do wander how much money they do earn from being so aggressive to tourists. I would imagine it’d be quite a turn off. A bunch of strangers yapping in my ears and tapping and pulling my arms while thumbing for directions to our guesthouse didn’t help with the warming up to the locals. Just piss off and let me read my Vaguely Planet book (more on that later). To get a way from these folks, we ran into Beijing station metro stop. According to our metro map, HaoYuan Binguan is right by the Dengshikou station. Too bad the map didn’t indicate clearly that this station is still under construction. What to do, what to do. I picked up the mobile, quickly dismissing the $3/minute international roaming charges, dialed the hotel. The receptionist suggested we take a taxi which should cost about 20Y (around USD$2) from where we were.
Simple enough yeah? This is China, so of course it’s not simple. It was around 6pm and I think the drivers want to go have dinner and didn’t want to pick us up. Our fare was refused by not just one but numerous drivers. Then came our saviour. This frail old guy who looks like he weighs less than my backpack comes riding in on his 3-wheel cargo bike offering us a ride. We agreed for 20Y. The ride was so slow that women and children walked faster than us. This man has got to be the most fit person on earth being able to haul the 2 of us and 2 stuffed backpacks on that little bike. Throughout the ride, he told us how bad the place we’re staying in is and offered to take us to a better place. I wonder how he knew that HaoYuan Binguan sucked ass when he had no idea that it even existed. The old dude took us to another place up the road thinking we’ve arrived. He even asked for an extra 20Y when we finally got to HaoYuan Binguan. My sympathy for this old guy quickly disappeared like dissenters in China. I tossed him 22Y as he yelled at us.
