Baby, I love you

Saturday, 17/11/2012 – 156 A.D.

What a difference a day makes! Or rather, what a difference the weather makes. After a hearty night’s sleep we woke up to golden sunshine peeping through the Shanghai smog, but more importantly, no rain. Yep, the sky had stopped crying and its tears ceased to fall. Time to be happy all round! Just so long as we’re both wearing three layers.

Our ever-happy receptionist at the hotel had still not found any English maps, but he told us we could get one from the post office two minutes down the road. We tried to find it, but failed. Oh dear, was it going to be another one of those days like yesterday? There’s plenty to see in Shanghai, but it’s a pain when you can’t mark things out on the map, especially when the city is as large as this one. Therefore we formed a vague plan to head to Peoples’ Square, the very heart of Shanghai, and see if we could locate tourist facilities.

We found a man with a magazine stall flogging maps for £1.50, but they were far too large for our purposes. Peoples’ Square didn’t seem to be very square where we were standing, but we didn’t end up having very long to explore the area. We’d only taken a few steps before we were asked to take the picture of three young Chinese. Our voices led to the, “Are you English?” question, which led to the, “Where in England you come from?” question, which in turn led to much conversation. 'Herman' (our name for him, didn't catch it) is in Shanghai for an internship – something to do with computers, and he is being visited by his two female friends from back home (caught the name of the city, didn't remember it). They are Mei Qi (pronounced May-Shay), who is a student of English, and Emmy (SIC – same name as my parents’ cat, which I didn’t tell her), who studied traditional Chinese medicine.

After chatting in the “square” for a while, our new friends invite us to join them for something, which neither of us quite catch, but we both agree to. Some kind of show, possibly involving puppets? If they’re water puppets then we’ve been there, done that! The five of us walk across the square, passing through a small tunnel and then into a strange area which is described to us as a place for matchmaking. Yes, in Shanghai the older generation who are long past being out on the pull prefer to come to the park, jot down their vital statistics on a card, and hope their future sweetheart passes and spots them. Who needs online dating when you’ve got this?!

We continue to walk a few streets and enter a big old building called the Champs-Elysees Mall. Up some stairs we go to the first floor, into a shop, and a woman in traditional red dress invites us into a small side room, with no doors or windows. All that’s there is a rather grand wooden table, five chairs, some tiny mugs, and lots and lots of tea. Ah, right – it’s tea tasting time!

The tea lady comes in and closes the door and immediately my defences are up. The tearoom scam is probably the most well-known trick that foreigners fall for in the whole of China. Basically you get befriended by someone who hangs out with you for a bit, then takes you for a tea-tasting session, before suddenly disappearing out the back door and leaving you with an astronomical bill that contains several more zeros than it ought to. So, I quickly played out potential scenarios in my mind:

1.      There are three of them – if they try to slip away all at once, they’re going to struggle.

2.      There are three of them (four including the tea lady), but they’re all pretty small – if they turn nasty and claim we need to pay up, I reckon that Tim and I can take `em.  

Semi-assured in that respect, I ask to see the prices. I have to ask several times. A price list is waved swiftly before my eyes, but I still don’t get a concrete answer. Oh well, maybe I am being paranoid again? Just sit back and enjoy it, Jamesy! Not everyone in the world is out to diddle you!

No, that’s not warpaint I’m wearing under the eye, it’s a certain type of tea leaf that Mai Qi put there to help the skin – you can see Herman applying some to Our Kids’ peepers in the background. The basic tea tasting routine went as follows:

1. Tea lady hands out a jar of a particular type of tea.

2. We all pass it round, sniff it and comment how good it is.

3. The tea is poured out into shot-size glasses, which we have to knock back in three, savouring the taste as we do so.

4. Sometimes little rituals are performed before the shots, such as waving our hands over the liquid in a certain motion for good luck, health, wealth, a playstation 3, etc.

[Touching the three-legged toad for good luck (that’s not its little chamber pot to the right, it’s my latest shot of tea.]

[Tim strengthens Anglo-Chinese relations by teaching Herman that trick where you make it appear as though you’ve voluntarily snapped your nose.]

[High as kites on herbal tea, Mai Qi tries on my glasses while Emmy gestures for peace.]

We must have got through about eight or nine different teas (some of which were very nice, others just okay) before the time came for us to pay up. I’d dragged out of Mai Qi the information that the price for us to sit in the room was £3, so that was pretty good, but the total bill for tasting all those teas within said room was considerably more - £30 per person! You can get three good boozey nights out for that in Cambodia! Although our new-found friends aren’t out to scam us, they’re obviously part of the "have class" of modern China, as opposed to the have-nots. But there was no pressure to buy any of the tea, even though the girls each bought a pot of their favourite. Tim was about to buy a pot to take home until I whispered that he’d forgotten to carry the decimal point, the realisation of which caused him to reverse his order! But then Herman said it was tradition for Chinese people to buy something for new friends, so he shelled-out for a pot of tea for us to take home with us, which seemed like a decent gesture.

It was about midday when we left our authentic tea-tasting session, still recovering from open wallet surgery, but happy to have done something the proper Chinese way, with proper Chinese people. Due to our proximity to Nanjing Road – the most crowded street in all of China – the girls were happy to hit the shops, and Herman was reluctantly forced to tag along. Not wanting to use up all of our Shanghai time in H&M and Zara, Tim and I said our goodbyes, with a vague plan to keep in touch and possibly meet up for drinks another evening (hopefully not in the trendiest, dearest bars the city had to offer!)

Back to being a duo, we headed five minutes down the road to the area known as The Bund (“bund” meaning muddy bank in some form of Chinese). This is the point along the river where everyone gathers to stand on the more traditional side of Shanghai and look across to the eastern bank where the modern city has developed with all its economic powerhouse skyscrapers. There isn’t much over there for us, so standing and taking a few snaps on the western side sufficed.

Then something happened, something which should not have been totally unexpected, given our Chinese experience so far, but which caused the two of us to break down in fits of laughter afterwards. Tim was innocently photographing the other side of the river when a Chinese woman with a camera and a baby approached him and asked if she could have picture of him holding the baby. Of course he was only too happy to oblige, so the lady then snapped several pictures of Our Kid holding her kid. She even asked him to turn to a different side at one point so that the light would be better for the photo. I kept a straight face while I snapped him being snapped, but honestly, it was the funniest thing I have seen in a long time! What next? The newly-formed Chinese government want a piccy together with him???

After all the excitement of the morning, we needed to slow down a little. After a quick lunch in a fast food chain that I’m too embarrassed to namecheck, we headed into the Old Town. This is where we ended up yesterday when the drizzle went into overdrive, but under fine clear skies the experience of strolling in the old streets was vastly improved. It’s the same old thing that we’ve seen many times before – stores selling tat to the tourists, but not just the Westerners, mainly to people from other parts of China. We had another look for coats, but decided to leave it `til the proper hardcore locals-only clothing market we want to check out tomorrow. We can just about get by without a proper jacket here, but it’ll be a different ballgame in Beijing. On the way back we turned down a side street where they sold all kinds of interesting food stuff. I didn’t take any pictures; couldn’t really, given the assault on my nostrils. I’ve come across some pretty putrid outdoor smells since setting foot in Asia, but what I smelt at this point was not of this Earth. It was like sweaty feet meets gorgonzola meets Beelzebub’s armpit. The kind of smell that lingers, that if you inhale hard enough in its presence you can get your dinner out of it. Bleurgh!

Epilogue

Maybe you’ve guessed it, but something wasn’t sitting right with me, and it wasn’t the spicy beef and green peppers I munched down for tea. I didn’t know it at the time (circa 23:00 this evening), but the same thing wasn’t sitting right with Timbo either. After doing a bit of googling (not easy under Chinese search engine censorship!), it wasn’t hard to see that we’d been scammed by our new found friends bastards. Yep, you’d already guessed it, hadn’t you? I mean, who pays 30 quid for a load of tea, even in an expensive city like Shanghai! It’s China for gawd’s sake, there’s tea everywhere and it costs b*gger all! And as for that gesture Herman made when he bought a pot of tea for us? Well that cost b*gger all as well!

The internet has plenty of reports of “students” asking tourists to take their pictures, then taking them for a highly elaborate ruse to these hideously over-priced tea ceremonies. I only really homed in on the scam I’d experienced when I included ‘Champs-Elysees Mall’ in the search criteria. Previously I’d done my homework and knew that such scams existed, but the glaring flaw in my knowledge was the following - the money the scammers use to pay for their tea is not their money at all, it belongs to the tea house. And all that talk of them visiting Shanghai is absolute garbage – they live here all along, it’s all part of the ruse to make the unsuspecting tourist think that everyone is in the same boat. And it’s a boat that leaks, glaringly once you look properly underneath.

One thing I did not mention was the tassel. At the end of the ceremony, once the bill was settled up, tea lady set down five coloured tassels for us all to have, complimentary-like. They are typical of the type of thing we’ve seen in tat stores all around. It seemed a bit strange, but we didn’t intervene when Mai Qi tied a tassel to the bottom of my day bag and Herman did the same to Tim’s, supposedly all in the name of good luck. What I now know is that this is a sign to their dirty little comrades that we’ve already been scammed and to steer clear of us, lest they try the same trick again and we become suspicious. The thing even has small bells on it so it makes a noise when we walk! I had to hand it to these kids, they really had it all worked out! And we wore those tassels on our bags all afternoon like a couple of mugs taken for 30 sheets.

Don’t get me wrong, £30 is not too much to lose. If it had been more than that I would have refused to pay anyway, yet online there are stories of people shelling out hundreds of pounds! For the performance these three young actors gave (well two really, because Emmy didn’t say much – we think she is a trainee), I have to admit that they really earned their money, which split three ways and with the tea house taking its cut isn’t a vast sun. Good job we didn’t buy any of the bloody tea! I’ve had nights out that cost more than £30 and weren’t half as good as the performance I was treated to, but that is not the point. For once the money does not matter. It’s the fact that I was taken in by it all, even though something deep at the back of my mind was screaming that it was a scam. Guess I was right to be paranoid! Travelling the world we have come across sooo many confidence tricks that eventually we were bound to fall for one of them. But in response, I feel cheated, I feel embarrassed and I feel angry. Part of me wants to find those three little %&*!)’s and wring their necks, but another part of me wants to sit them down and ask why, when they have such a good grasp of English, do they spend their time in this crappy little enterprise when surely they could do something much more productive, much better paying, and much more moral? But what do I know about their circumstances, and at this late hour, I couldn’t give a monkey's toss about them.  

Tim felt exactly the same way as I did, but after reading several of the stories online, we were ready for action. Plans were formed. Tomorrow was a new day (what a difference a day makes???) and we were going to take our revenge. If those little scammers thought they’d seen the last of us English boys then by Britannia they had another thing coming…