How much do you love me?

After six months of highly limited contact with friends and loved ones, I am happy to announce my reconnection to the western world. I know that China isn't the most convenient place to call or send packages, so I'm doing my best to make this as trouble-free for those of you who want to make your lonely, sad, poor abroad friend really really happy (okay, so I'm neither lonely nor sad, but I would like to hear from any/all of you).

3 troublefree ways to make carmen smile:

1. Call me! Home phone: 86-10-84061204, Cell phone: 86-13717644671. I have already included the country code/city code for you, so all you need is to dial 011 (international code) before these numbers. You either need an international phone card, or, see next point....

2. Skype me! Skype is a free program that you can download on the internet and use to chat with anyone from China to Botswana. The plus to this option is that it's free, free, FREE - i.e. even my poor college student friends have no excuse. My user name is carmen.wolfe - add me to your friends and we can set up a time to meet online and chat.

3. Mail me! Well, mail a package to me! Either cut/paste/print out the chinese characters below or copy the romanized translation - putting both would be best to ensure that the disgruntled chinese postman doesn't decide it's not worth his time to deal with a poor foreign girl's mail and "accidentally" lose it.

中国
北京市; 100001
东城区东直门内北小街
26号楼12单元103号
Carmen Wolfe

Carmen Wolfe
DongZhiMen Nei Bei Xiao Jie, Building 26, Apt. 12-103
Dong Cheng District
Beijing, China 100001

As an added incentive for option 3, I'm offering personalized China presents that I will carry back across the big wide Pacific in January and send to anyone whose return address I see show up at my front door. Postcards, letters, and packages all qualify :)

The Bright Side

I did think of one exception to my previous statement that nothing in China is simple: home water delivery.

(Scenario occurs any time, day/night, rain/shine, summer/winter; exact transcript given)

Allison: "uhh, we're out of water"
Me: "Okay"
(pick up cell phone, dial number labeled "water")
"Hello, bring water. Jug number 2109."
Water guy: "same address?"
Me: "Yes"
Water guy: "Okay, we're coming"

(less than ten minutes later, knock knock)

Me (on the couch): "Hello water guy! Thanks so much for peddling your bike over here in the dark/cold and lugging this huge water jug into our apartment. No no, don't take off your shoes, it's okay. The water cooler is in the kitchen. Thanks so much! Here's a dollar, see you next time!"

It's so convenient I almost can't believe it. Well..it's convenient until I remember that in America all I have to do is turn on the faucet :)

What's in a name

Opening of a bank account - simple, right? Well, in China nothing is ever simple. It took almost two hours and four sets of forms to open a legal bank account for Wolfecarmenchristine. Who's that? That's now my name according to my bank, see below for their logic.

Name 1: Carmen Wolfe.
Fairly standard wouldn't you say? Here's the loosely translated response I got when I handed the attendant my forms: "Poor little foreigner - do you not know that you're in China? You see, in China, we use Chinese names, you know, with Chinese characters. Please fill out the form again using your correct name."

(Tear up forms, fill out new ones while attendant works on account)

Name 2: 武凯萌
This is my standard Chinese name - a basic transliteration of my English name into Chinese characters that I use on all legal forms in China including school ID and police registration. As official as it sounds though, it's simply a made up name given to me by my former roommate that I have changed several times on whims to make it easier to remember. The Chinese name seemed to be sufficient until I handed over my passport and the attendant couldn't locate my Chinese name in it. She was suprised to find out that the American government doesn't legally recognize the fabricated Chinese names of American citizens. "Try again, please use the name in your passport."

(Tear up forms, fill out new forms as disgruntled patron walks up to the window where I'm sitting and begins to breathe on my neck)

Name 3: Carmen Christine Wolfe
That's as official as it gets. I feel confident and add it to all four required forms. All is well until they look at my Chinese visa. Sure enough, in traditional Chinese style, the name on my visa is listed with my last name on the first line, followed by my first and middle names below. Attendent in pitying tone: "Poor little foreigner, in China, we write our family name first, how could you not know? Sorry, but you'll have to do this again, correctly."

(Tear up forms, fill out new forms, man behind me physically scoots me and my papers over so that he can do his business while I finish)

Name 4: Wolfecarmenchristine
Tired of form filling, I complete everything except the name and then pass it over to the attendent along with my passport and tell her to write whatever she thinks my name should be. This is what she wrote, so this is what it is.

The three upsides to this experiences are 1) It's fun to have a new signature - I was tired of my old one anyways, and 2) I finally memorized my home address, and 3) Easy access to money - convenient to me, dangerous to my account balance.

The Cheap Seats

"Impressions" is a nightly performance event in Yangshuo, China employing over 500 workers and performers to create a dazzling display of lights, music, and theater. The Chinese love their neon lights - in caves, in clubs, on the sign for the post office, etc. - and they spared no bulb in the creation of the show. However, instead of being tacky, they managed to create a pretty incredible show with nice visual effects of colored lights on the water at night with hundreds of performers rowing individual boats in patterns along the river.

A show this intricately designed obviously comes at a price, a rather high price at that. So instead of buying the tickets from the ticket office, I obviously set about asking around town for anyone who could sell discount tickets to the show. After a little prying, I found tickets at less than a fourth of the original price. The only catch was that we'd be sitting on the "second platform." Not sure what this meant (I was listening in Chinese and trying to translate to mom what our cheap tickets included), we blindly decided to take the deal.

I should have known something was wrong when we turned onto the dirt road, through the chickens, behind the old chinese houses, and through an empty field. Smashed cozily into a rickety Chinese minivan with several other Chinese tourists, my mother and I sped through the back "roads" of Yangshuo hoping that we were simply taking a shortcut to the river venue. As our driver parked the van behind a pile of old bricks, we should have guessed that we were in for a nontraditional viewing of "Impressions."

In an Underground Railroad fashion, our driver pulled out a lamp and directed us down a narrow dirt path through several different fields, yelling for us to keep up lest we be lost among the spinach plants. After crossing a few small streams and shuffling down a dirt embankment we found ourselves at the river's edge facing a bamboo raft bridge. Before us lay a collection of floating rafts tethered together to form a walkway out to larger barges outfitted with shoddily hand-made bleachers. A swaying and slightly damp walk out to the bleachers was followed by a shaky climb up a small wooden ladder to our lofty floating perches. So that's what a "second platform" is apparently...either they didn't quite tell me the truth about our "side seating" or something got lost in translation.

Despite our seating in the prop area of the river, we managed some great views of the show and enjoyed the brilliant colors along with the rest of the Chinese tourists. It was an adventure for sure, and I think that my mom will remember our jungle walk to our seats much more than she would've ever remembered a show.

Standing Up for Justice

When backpacking, I have a certain knack for finding good cheap hotel rooms. This usually includes walking out of the train/bus station where a few dozens hotel touts bombard you with pictures and prices, carrying a Rough Guide travel guide in hand for map referencing, and insisting that you have a reservation while actually listening for which hotel is offering the best prices. Then, as soon as the touts have subsided, you either follow advice from former travellers and ignore all of the touts, or you actually take their suggestions but ditch them before arriving at the hotel to avoid commission fees and to bargain down the price even farther. 99% of the time, this works wonderfully.

However, when discovering that the train my mother and I were taking to Guilin, China wouldn't arrive until one thirty a.m., I decided that for her comfort and my peace of mind that we might should actually book ahead (something I haven't done in all of my four months of travelling.) I thought that it would be easy, right? I went to a travel agent. We argued about the price. He finally agreed to mine (250 kuai - 30 bucks). He booked the hotel. I paid him. He gave me a receipt with the price, the hotel's name, and their phone number. Very straightforward.

Yes, very straightforward until we got to Guilin. After being promptly picked up by a travel agent in his van we were taken to our hotel. It wasn't in a great place, it wasn't the most attractive, and it wasn't the name of the hotel that was given to us, but we were tired and didn't really mind. Well, I didn't mind until our agent casually mentioned as were were bringing in our bags that we would need to pay him an extra 100 kuai. Why? His reason: because we are foreigners and the hotel we had been promised wasn't available for us. The real reason: because the travel agent knew that at two a.m. we would have no choice but to pay the extra money and that they could pull this stunt and make a bigger profit. He's obviously never met a backpacker named Carmen Wolfe.

Naturally, I refused to pay the extra money. I had a receipt with the agreed price and I wasn't budging an inch over it. Yes, 100 kuai is only about 12 dollars, but it's not the money...it's the principle.

In China, any disagreements must be resolved through yelling, in Chinese, until you get what you want. So, this is what I did. My poor mom was a trooper sat in the lobby of the hotel at two a.m. while I fought for justice. I called our former travel agent and yelled, while I yelled at the new agent, while I yelled at the hotel staff, and while the travel agents proceeded to yell at each other. After almost an hour of yelling, nothing was being resolved. I wasn't letting go of my red stamped binding contract receipt and finally declared that we would sleep in our agent's van to preclude him from going home if he didn't find us a hotel, right then, for the agreed price. Seeing that he wasn't going to sleep at all that night unless he fixed this problem, our agent was suddenly able to think of a perfect place, and by 3:30 am we were resting soundly in our 250 kuai room.

Is it worth it to argue for over an hour at two in the morning over twelve bucks? To most people, no. But to me, I do things like this for the next traveller who comes along after me - I assure that they won't try pulling that stunt on a foreigner for a while. I'm just taking it one small victory for justice a time.