This weekend, on the way back from a three-day trip to Beijing, I saw in the Shenzhen airport bathroom what is perhaps the most accidentally appropriate mistranslation ever (behind this door is the Western toilet, apparently only for the weak; the other seven toilets were all squatties):
If preferring Western toilets means I’m weak, I don’t wanna be strong!
Remember how I was just saying it’s only a matter of time before I start encountering the wildlife Lamma has in store? Well, apparently the time is nigh. Spotted tonight, albino and shimmying along the walls of the bathroom (but he scurried away when I tried to get closer for a better photo!):
This week, I had what I’m pretty sure was my first full-on China moment, as I can recall, here in Hong Kong. (China moment: total confusion, language barrier, weirdness, inability to convey thoughts or meaning, etc.)
I went strolling down a street in Causeway Bay looking for a salon to get a pedicure. I passed by one place where a lady was handing out flyers (they do this everywhere to try to get you to go in because Hong Kong is such a vertical city; you’d never otherwise know about all the business on floors 2-20!). The lady handed my the flyer, and I asked her if they did pedicures, since the only thing on the flyer was “foot skin shaving” or something like that. She claimed that indeed, they did have pedicures, and took me up to the 13th floor. (At this point, I assumed the flyer just had a bad English translation, as I’ve had several pedicures here where shaving dead skin off your feet is included as part of the process.)
I sat down and soaked, a bit apprehensive, but someone came with what seemed like the right tools. I should have known when they didn’t ask me to pick out my color of nail polish, but I think I just wanted to believe it would be right. The guy came and started cutting away at the skin on my feet. Kind of gross. At the end, I pointed to my toenails and was like “You’re going to do that next, right?” and he just looked at me, bewildered (no one in this office seemed to speak much English) and said that he couldn’t do that. Soooooo there I was, with nice soft, shaved feet and still-ugly toenails. Apparently this is what they call the Shanghai-style pedicure, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the Western-style pedicure!
I wasn’t really a big fan of the skin shaving. If it were included in a pedicure, I guess it’s all right. It does make your feet super soft. But as a runner, I don’t much care for it. My feet were too sensitive and hurt a bit when I ran the next day. It just feels weird and certainly isn’t worth the $18.
For the record, later this week I went to the expat area of town and got a real pedicure by English-speaking staff at a nice and very normal place! (Lovely Spa in Lan Kwai Fong, I highly recommend them if you’re looking for pedicures in Hong Kong!)
So this is what should be my final post about that epic visit from my buddy Joanna.
While we were in Macau, we crossed a pedestrian bridge coming from the ferry terminal where there were some very interesting and hilarious PSA ads posted. The ads were a series — there were probably seven or eight in total. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who’s ever walked around Beijing and experienced what I’ll call the spitting-staring-shoving-screaming syndrome at whom these ads were aimed!
I think they are made even more hilarious because they seem so random in Portuguese. I had to share a few of the ads (click thru for more):
I know I haven’t been writing much of anything lately, so I thought I’d write a simple update to let you know I’m still alive. I apologize in advance for the complaining tone of this post, but it will give you an idea of what I’ve been going through trying to get all my documents back in order to ensure I can leave China to go to Hong Kong in a few weeks. It will also give you an idea of just how much red tape it takes wading through to get anything done here, and possibly even make you thankful for the suddenly-not-so-inefficient-seeming U.S. government!
I spent last week dealing with the aftermath of my stolen passport, and that endeavor that seems bound to take up all of this week as well. Though I successfully received my new U.S. passport in just seven days — the U.S. government is apparently more efficient when it is not operating actually within the U.S. — getting my new visa is proving a bit trickier.
Every foreigner who comes to China is required to register with the local police station upon arrival. The government likes to keep track of exactly who is living where and for how long; Chinese people are required to register as well, though I’m sure it’s a different process. After registering, we are given a “temporary residence registration permit,” and I have been told I cannot get a new visa without this sheet of paper. I had one before, but it expired and I hadn’t gotten a new one yet when my passport was stolen. This seemingly simple task, however, can become quite cumbersome because the police require you to present a number of official documents: copies of a contract of your lease, copies of the ID card and registration of the homeowner (who in most cases is not the foreigner himself but rather a landlord), etc. I’ve managed to gather all of my necessary documents, but for whatever reason, the police station in my district is closed. Now, how they can require you to register (the law says you’re actually supposed to register within 24 hours of being in China) and then shut down the police station, I’m not quite sure…
This weekend I went on a wild goose chase trying to get registered. Saturday, one of my roommates and I went to my district police HQ, where we found out via a note posted on the door that the station was closed for the weekend. The note directed all visitors to instead go to a second location nearby. Since we aren’t familiar with the area, we wandered around for about 30 minutes before finally finding a youngish Chinese man on bike who offered to just show us where the station was himself.
Upon arriving at the second station, we were told that it, too, was closed, and we were then directed to a third station. We took a cab, but the cab driver didn’t know where the station was. So out we went, off to ask random people on the street if they could help us find it (thankfully she speaks more Chinese than me or we’d have been in even more trouble).
After a while of wandering, an old man finally successfully directed us to the third police station (which, like all the previous ones, is tucked away in some nondescript side alley. How they expect clueless foreigners to find these places… not sure). We thought we’d finally hit the holy grail when we saw that this station actually had employees inside, but again, it was a strike. The lady working in the station simply got angry and yelled at us, telling us she couldn’t register us because we could only register at the station near our home, despite our repeated insistence that said station was closed. (Mei banfa, she kept saying. “Nothing can be done.”)
At this point, we enlisted the help of a man working in one of the many magazine kiosks along the street. Though he had no clue what to tell us, he took the initiative of calling 110 (the general Beijing information line) for us (because being able to speak Chinese and being able to understand it being spoken, on the phone, are two horses of a different color). The operator told us we should go to the Haidian District police headquarters, since they control all the stations in our district.
After being turned down by about four or fives cabs whose drivers claimed not to know where the station was, we finally found someone willing to take us. And once at the main police station, we finally got someone who seemed to be an actual policeman and not just an office worker to speak with us. But, once again, he simply refrained, “Mei banfa.” I tried to explain to him (in terribly broken Chinese) “My passport was stolen, and I need a new visa to get out of the country, which I can’t get without the registration, which I can’t get at the police station because it is closed!” “Mei banfa. Go back Monday.”
Three hours walking around Beijing in 96-degree weather trying to find someone who would register me and give me the stupid sheet of paper I need to get my visa, and I still came up short.
Well, here it is Monday. And here I am, still without a temporary registration permit. I returned to the police station, only to find it still closed (despite the sign on the door that says it was only going to be closed over the weekend). And I again tried to return to the second station, only to find it closed again as well. This, in a nutshell, is China. Senseless layers of red tape and bureaucracy, no internal communications, and crazy laws and required paperwork to do anything. If I make it out of this country, it will be a miracle.
*My coworker is going to come today to take me to the police station(s) in the hopes of figuring out a solution. If any such solution can be found, I will update accordingly.
