Oct 29, 2010 18:37
China is a terrible place filled with mostly terrible people. I couldn't have been happier when my trip ended and the plane spit me back out into the well oiled machine that is Kansai International Airport. I'm sure someone with a mind with the politically correct switches flipped on is thinking that it's terribly mean of me to make sweeping judgment of a nation that I experienced for a mere 5 days. And to those people I say, China started it.
It started with a tour we'd booked through our hotel. Generally Jason and I wander around by ourselves when we travel, but the Great Wall wasn't accessible by the mass transit system. The tour company had told us to be ready to leave at 6:30 a.m., so we woke up at 5:30 , showered and dressed, then hit up the nearest convenience store for a little breakfast, since the hotel restaurant didn't open till 7:00. 6:30 arrived and the tour bus was nowhere to be seen, so I flipped on the TV.
The first channel seemed to be footage from the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. I watched for a bit, then flipped over to another channel that was showing some sports footage. Also Olympics. Maybe you can see where this is going. Flip. Chinese athlete winning gold. Flip. Chinese athlete having gold medal hung around her neck. Flip. Chinese anthem playing. Flip. Jackie Chan movie. Flip. Newsreader standing on the outskirts of some modern Olympic facility.
It was all rather eerie, and I briefly wondered if I'd slept through an electrical storm on the plane ride over and traveled to 2008. A glance at Jason's bulging stomach confirmed I had not.
Anyways, our tour van trundled up at around 8:00, and Jason and I set off with our fellow passenger, an older German lady who couldn't speak any English. That left the tour guide to concentrate on us. I forget her name so we'll call her Boots. Boots immediately launched into a speech peppered with rather impressive words like "auspicious" and "acrimonious", and I was thinking that we had lucked out in finding such a fluent tour guide. She yakked on and on about the Wall for near half an hour. When she finished speaking Jason asked some simple question, probably "Where can I buy some more hair gel?". Boots stared at us momentarily, then announced there were plenty of government quality shops we could visit on later in the day. I didn't think much of it, until Jason began asking some touristy questions, which the tour guide frowned at. If she did say anything, it was at complete odds at the question. Consider the following exchange.
"When did they begin building the Great Wall?"
"We will start the climb soon."
A few more standard questions and I realized that the woman couldn't understand English at all. It was as though she had learned to speak phonetically. If we asked a question she seemed to scan our sentence for a word she knew, match it up with a word in a speech she had memorized, then go off bleating on an unrelated topic for 10 minutes. Which is how an innocent question about where we could eat Peking Duck led into a 15 minute speech on famous lakes in china. I gave up asking anything at all after the first 20 minutes, but Jason was rather more persistent and continued trying all day.
We arrived at the Great Wall. Our tour guide waved us over to her, told us to stand for a photo, then stood back as some lady hurriedly took our photo and then barked "100" at us with hand oustretched, about 15 Canadian dollars. I was rather annoyed to have been set up by our tour guide, a person who we were presumably paying to help us avoid these type of scams. It was a theme that continued throughout the day.
She later brought us to a "high quality government jade factory", the factory being one man carving jade and 20 rooms of overpriced jewellry. I'm not the biggest shopper and was a bit gobsmacked when she told us we had 45 minutes to look around. I'm not a complete moron either, and happen to know the relative price of jade, as it's a pretty big staple of lots of places in Japan and Taiwan. This place was comitting highway robbery, and that's an understatement.
I glided around the store, as our tour guide desperately tried to direct us to display tables and told Jason he should buy me a nice necklace and commented that I'd be so beautiful if I bought this 500 Canadian dollar statue. She was clearly in league with the store, and looked completely crestfallen as we left.
It was noon by the time we finished at the jade factory. Jason and I were starved, having eaten at 6:00 and spent an hour climbing up the Great Wall. Jason asked if we could stop for lunch. We figured there would be no problem with this as our tour group was only us and the German lady, who clearly had no idea what was going on. "No, later, Ming Tombs now."
It was close to 1:30 when we finally arrived at our restaurant, which was "a quality government food restaurant". Jason was too starved to wait for food, so he puttered around at some fruit stands before our tour guide angrily found him and insisted we wait for the "quality food".
Next we went to a "quality government health clinic" where we were supposed to receive foot massages. As we sat on overstuffed chairs, a rather miserable looking women came in, and pointed dramatically at the picture of a foot behind her. She began to rattle off a series of astounding facts, like the heel controlled your heart and your big toe was connected to your brain and needed to be massaged in order to present headaches. I probably should have guessed something like this was bound to happen and I saw all the pictures of 4000 year old Chinese witch doctors scattered over the walls, all with little placques praising them to the ends of the Earth.
Then health lady told us, in what seemed to genuine awe, that Chinese Doctors could tell you what was wrong with you simply by checking your pulse. And on that note, a whale of a man shuffled in, stinking of the cigar I'd seen him smoking earlier in the hallway. He didn't seem to notice Jason and I and made a beeline for our German friend. He gripped her hand, told her she had intestine problems, then motioned for our lecturer to bring over a pack of pills, insisting that she buy them. Our companion shook her head in confuzzlement, while the "doctor" kept insisting, before getting red in the face from annoyance and stomping out. Our foot massagers stood up to leave, but the health lecturer looked at Jason and me and ushered the Doctor back in. He sat next to Jason, took Jason's pulse (which is actually in one of your wrist bones, who knew), then told him he had stomach problems. Jason made it clear he did not want to buy random Chinese pills, and the doctor stormed out for good.
"The foot massage is over", the lecturer announced. The masseurs stood up mid rub and left without a word.
The rest of the day followed similarly. More scams at a "quality government" tea shop and a "quality government" jade shop. Thinking back on it now, it seems ridiculous. Not only the tour, but the fact that the Chinese government though that this approach to tourism would endear themselves to foreigners and entice them to spend money.
This was day 1 of 5. I'll write about the Forbidden City and Shanghai later. But it doesn't get better.