The Limits of Mental Tricks
Two entries ago I suggested that various traveling bummers could be made less bumley by the use of a mantra indicating to yourself that all of these things were new and exotic experiences, even if they weren’t the new and exotic experiences that you had in mind, or even paid for.
At my personal stage of enlightenment, I can’t experience with that equanimity, being robbed of $300 by a Chinese ATM machine.
I have already had problems with the local ATMs not echoing my keystrokes, which leads to my having an incorrect idea of the machine state.
The ATM at the corner of Wusi and Shatan Beijie was informative and consistent, all except for the part where it spit out 300 Yuan instead of 2500. It printed out a receipt for 2500. It caused Wachovia to take $365.52 out of my checking account, which is 2500 Yuan at the day’s exchange rate. Just, I was holding three 100-yuan notes instead of 25 of them.
So…the next half hour spent in the bank talking to the intern who spoke the best English even though she was not of high rank. Then I couldn’t find a large supply of pretty post card stamps. The Rough Guide had the post office location wrong. Then it started to rain. We stayed in the hotel room most of the afternoon, venturing out when it stopped raining to the parks north of the Forbidden City. The Park with the White Pagoda is open until 10 PM but you don’t find out until you’re inside (and paid your 10 yuan admission fee) that the white pagoda and all the other attractions close at 6 PM. And they cost another 10 yuan to get in, when they’re open.
About 4 taxis in a row refused to take us to the restaurant we’d chosen, even one hailed by a local pair who had stopped to get their photos taken with us. One certainly can’t blame this on anti-foreigner prejudice: the taxis pull over when Dave waves his hand, and it’s pretty obvious from some distance that we aren’t Chinese. The current theory is that they don’t know how to get to where we are going (the address is written on a piece of paper) and they don’t want to lose face by asking directions.
The GeGeFu Restaurant is perhaps the Chinese version of one of those places where knights joust. Very good food. The whole place is a piece of performance art: one is supposed to be at the house of an elder princess. The elder princess character is so prominent in the script, that when the dancers come out, which they do several times in the course of the evening, they face her, who is sitting upstage in the courtyard, with their backs to the diners, who are in the main house. The rest of the time she pantomimes playing Go with other princesses, or just promenades about. Hers is not a speaking part. One is invited to tour the rooms of her house, a small town museum of old stuff. The rooms also have tables and utensils set up. I suppose that on busier nights than a rainy Tuesday, it’s possible to rent the rooms for your party.
The menu consists of soup. A prix fixe depending how many of you there are. We were “2 to 4”. Dinner begins like a Korean meal with a lot of stuff on the table: sausages, tiny sweet bones with a bit of meat on them, a tasty tofu paste whose recipe is indecipherable, celery sticks boiled in stock, I’m forgetting about half of them. For the soup, you have the choice of Duck or Deer, and a general direction for it to take, such as Mushrooms or vegetables. We chose Duck and Chinese Medicine Vegetables for 700. When the soup bowl got low the costumed waitress would come around with a large teapot filled with duck stock, and an excellent duck stock it was, too; top off the tureen, and add a few different things: meatballs, new vegetables. Finally you had to say no more, at which point they brought out a plate of watermelon and what might have been Elizabeth melon. You see a lot of fat Chinese on the street these days.