Everyday Life in China & How I ended up with a Police Report!

OK folks, I understand there may be confusion as to the police report, and I’ll get to that part but this is the story of what it’s like for everyday life in China for the things you do at home and how wonderfully difficult that can be as a foreigner here in China… assuming you don’t speak fluent mandarin. So for anyone that wants a first hand account, things are not quite as easy as they’d seem!!

‘Central Park’ in Shenzhen, China

After about 2 days of searching, we found an apartment that seemed to fit our needs. It was located in Futian which is in the center of the city and was also allowing a short term lease which can be extremely hard to find in this city. Out of a population of 14 million living here, three different real estate agencies only offered us three options available and luckily, one of the three seemed a great fit. OK, great, apartment found, now how to secure it?
Lets start with meeting the real estate agent that needed to have our lease signed and collect on the deposit. Oh, wait… he doesn’t speak English. And since all we could say was ‘Hello’ and ‘Thanks’ in Chinese, this was going to be a problem. Off to the internet cafe and in comes Google Translator for the rental agreement.

Sitting at the Internet Cafe for 3 hours on Google Translator!!

However since the lease we needed to sign was on hard copy, he decided just to pull up a ‘standardized’ lease in Chinese off the internet. This would be interesting. So here we sat for the next three hours trying to communicate back and forth via Google and Bai’du, which is the Chinese version of Google that they all use here. As I mentioned… just everyday life in China for a non-speaking foreigner….

OK, next step was coming up with the money… Since ALL Chinese rentals require two months deposit, we needed to scrounge up 7,800 RMB to pay one month and two months deposit upon move in. Well, since this was news to us and since we hadn’t transferred money to the proper accounts, we ended up going from the Internet Cafe to 11 ATMs  across town.

Apparently, this guesthouse offers an included 1996 desktop computer for your use in the room during your $8 per night stay. Maybe the upgrade room offers a 2012 Macbook?

Since I have two ATM cards, the first would only pull a certain amount. That was the one that I typically use but out came my back up card. Unfortunately, my back up card only works at a handful of banks here in China so I was off to the next ATM but before leaving that one, my friend went to pull out the other half of the funds for the money needed but the machine ate her ATM card and to my surprise, it was the only one she had! OK, great, off to find the help we needed within the bank that included a translator. After thirty minutes of back and forth discussion (after finding a translator), they told us the card was ‘destroyed’ and there was nothing we could do. Awesome….

So now it was off to more ATM’s which ended up totaling 11 after all was said and done, a long distance call to my bank to raise a limit on my 2nd card at 11:50PM U.S. time and then a return to the agent to let them know I needed an additional hour. After calling my bank to raise the withdraw limit, my phone battery died in the middle of the city and the ‘customer service’ department closed at 12AM U.S. time. So now I was dealing with an issue as I could only pull out the max from my card and of course, you can’t exactly pay for things with a credit card here in China like you can in the U.S. or Europe, especially not a rental deposit using a Visa.

It was now back to the apartment where I’d left my luggage to find all the extra currencies I’d accumulated over the past few months to round up the remaining money needed. I had about 25 minutes before we were to meet the landlord and agent to sign the lease and make the payment. Next thing I know, I’m running down the street to find a currency exchange office and find one to run in and exchange my remaining Thai Baht, Vietnamese Dong, and US Dollars for Chinese RMB. When all was said and done, we came up with the exact amount after a two hour money run and all we had left to our names was 57RMB for lunch money. Luckily, monies were transferring the next day for our foreign banks however my friend was still without a way to access her account for the next few days…

Collecting my foreign currencies together…Does this look like a Hot Mess?!?

And because of that fact, she was an emotional basket case. When we later met with the landlord to sign everything, she was nice enough to offer to take us to lunch (according to Google Translator). We told her it had been a crazy day and we would be OK but she insisted. So now picture this scene…. I am walking down the street, 57 Yuan to my name, my friend is more or less crying as we walk down the sidewalk and leading us along the way is our Chinese landlord that has decided to take us to KFC. And if that weren’t enough, my friend is vegetarian so other than a bowl of corn on the menu in a Chinese KFC, there is nothing much else to order. As I’m walking with them both, I’m trying to tell our landlord once again that we are fine and that we don’t need to be taken to lunch. This gets lost in translation and as we’re walking up the steps into KFC, my friend is still crying uncontrollably, my landlord is trying to speak to me in Chinese, for some reason there is a hot dog vendor to my left on the sidewalk that is getting manhandled down the street by 15 policemen with his Red Bull Umbrella being dragged on the ground along with falling hot dogs from his stand and just as we open the door to KFC, I bump into an old man that is out walking his 3 legged monkey! It is then that the realization hit… I AM OFFICIALLY IN CHINA LAND!! Was this to be everyday life in China that I needed to get accustomed to?!?

To add to the authenticity of my Chinese surroundings, I give to you….drum-roll please… the official Chinese motorcycle! Is this how Honda Corp. started out? Have you figured out why I call this ‘ChinaLand’ yet?

When we walked up to the register, my landlord pointed to a menu item and I just gave the thumbs up. I showed her that one order was OK but she insisted on ordering two. Having not wanting to act out “My friend doesn’t eat chicken” I took both trays of chicken up the steps to grab a table. After we ate we decided to try and make a trip to the store to grab some things needed for the apartment. If you think our day has been crazy so far, please keep reading…. it has only just begun!

After doing some needed Googling, I found out that Shenzhen is actually home to over 10 Wal-Marts! Hoooooraaaay Wal-Mart!! We were on our way to Wally World and this would be my friend’s first time ever in one. What a ChinaLand experience… And if you’re thinking “What’s the big deal. It’s just Wal-Mart” then you have never been to China! For me, they might as well have painted their Wal-Mart letters out front in gold plating. I was excited because there is nothing like being able to shop in a familiar store from home when you’re running around in a place like China.

China Wal-Mart! Please excuse the lady in the trash can at the bottom of the pic…

When we got in, it really didn’t seem much different from the ones back home except most everything on the signs was in Chinese and you had to take a ramp to the second floor with your cart to get to everything needed that wasn’t a food item. So here we were, about two hours into shopping at Wally World with a full cart of stuff and just as soon as we were about to head to the register, my friend realized her purse was stolen! Last she saw it, she had it lying in with all the other things in the cart (which was not the best of ideas) but it had her phone and wallet in it with all her money as well as her passport!

Since we had just come from meeting with our landlord, we both needed to have our passports on us that day. At this point, I was thinking the worst. If it were truly stolen, I thought we never have a chance to see it again but I thought I better go back upstairs to retrace our steps to see if it was possibly found somewhere. I left her there, an ’emotional basket case’, and ran upstairs to look around. Having come up dry after ten minutes, I was suddenly grabbed by one of the Wal-Mart personnel. Apparently, the staff must have talked to my friend and found out what was going on and came upstairs to find me. He led me around to various departments to talk to other personnel but we were getting nowhere and I now realized that purse was long gone.

Eventually, we ended the search through the isles and headed back downstairs. When I went back to where I left my friend, she was gone. Confused, I headed for the front of the store and suddenly found her surrounded by about twenty Chinese people with about half of them being Wal-Mart employees.

“Be Magic & Open”? Are they priding themselves for their business hours of operation?

I also noticed she was waving what appeared to be her wallet at me from thirty yards away. I hurried toward her and sure enough, it was her wallet. Apparently, the person who stole her purse made out with all her money and her phone but was considerate enough to leave behind her wallet with a few business cards as well as her passport! I couldn’t believe it! Some guy had found the wallet and passport on the floor on his way out of the front door. My friend was still distraught about the lost phone and the money which amounted to about $100 USD but I don’t think she realized how lucky she was to have back her passport. Not only would that have caused a great deal of trouble and aggravation but would of also cost her a lot more money!

Of course, we were still standing there stuck in a crowd of twenty Chinese all trying to speak to us but not a one of them spoke any English. Eventually they brought us both back into their security room and to review security cameras but as we sat there, I figured this was a lost cause. Whomever took the money and phone was probably in Hong Kong by now. But there we sat… until the Shenzhen police arrived! Wait… who called the police? Uhh, apparently Wal-Mart did. Since I still thought this was all a lost cause, I tried telling them not to worry about it but they insisted we go down ‘to the station’. Great, this was going to be long night.

So, here we were, getting escorted by the police out of Wal-Mart with about a hundred Chinese staring at us as we get taken into the police car. And yes, the lights were on. Don’t ask me why they needed to be, but it only helped to intensify the stares. Back at ‘the station’ we had to give a police report. However, no one there spoke English so we had to use the service of some poor girl that was there filing a report for her stolen iPhone. After almost two hours at the station, we had finally finished the police report and then I had to get fingerprinted and put my ‘thumb’ stamp on the report. Yay. This was exactly what I wanted to do tonight!

My officially stamped police report in China!

So after this ordeal, we told them to take us back to Wal-Mart since we didn’t even know where we were right now… and we still needed to buy our stuff! Sooo, BACK to Wally World, police cars lights on, dropped off out front for another dramatic scene of two foreigners getting front door service to Wal-Mart by the police and then back where we started 4 hours ago shopping… then home by 1130PM….just everyday life in China….However, I think I’ll call this Black Monday!