We had a three day weekend for May Day. Not only did we get May Day off, (who knows why) but it’s also apparently such an important holiday that we didn’t even have to make it up! This is unprecedented in our breaks, as China loves giving “days off” and then scheduling 8-day weeks, (which, by the way, work really well with small children. Note the sarcasm.)
Deciding to go to Shanghai was easy. It’s the other major city in in this part of China. I’d wanted to go since my sister gave me a joint Bejing/Shanghai guidebook last February. Actually getting there, unfortunately, was another story. It took 2 Chinese people to assist me, 5 hours after school, 20 calls to Customer Service, and one 2 hour trip to the bank to open up an online account, spread over two weeks.
It’s crazy how, in China, they make it so difficult to spend your own money. In America, it is nearly encouraged and (or at least incredibly easy) to get a piece of plastic and chalk up any expenses that you may or may not be able to pay back in the immediate future. In China, it’s the opposite. They’re incredibly skeptical of online payments. Paying rent for multiple months makes us all feel like drug dealers, as we hand over to our land-lords stacks of bills six-inches thick. Even when booking flights online, the preferred methods of payment are arranging for someone from the website to pick up the cash payment from your apartment, or making a cash transfer into a random bank account.
As charming as I find those options, I couldn’t even utilize them, as I don’t speak Chinese. Even using a translator wouldn’t help much, as I don’t have an address to direct a messenger to. I decided that getting an online account would be the best option. That’s where the 2-hour trip to the bank came in, where they repeatedly told me (through L, my assistant/life translator), that there were serious limits, which, of course, were less than the price of even one ticket to Shanghai.
Eventually, I was given a Bank-USB, which I have to put into my computer if I want to access my own money and pay for the things I want online. Even with the extra hour it took to set up the online account (which has no English option), booking the flight took me and the woman who was helping me at least 30 tries and until 6 pm at night to figure out the myriad of passwords and extra steps needed to buy the tickets.
After all that, I got on the plane and realized Kelly and I were both sitting in middle seats next to women with babies on their laps in the aisle seats between us.
I’ll say it though. Shanghai was definitely worth it.
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