Hot N Cold

We have now progressed from Tibet to China proper. When I was in Tibet, I thought I was in China. I was wrong. Now that I am in China, I am in China. Not an easy distinction to understand, I don't think, unless you have been to both. Nevertheless, here we are in China. 

I feel like I am in some sort of strange rendition of Katy Perry's 'Hot N Cold.' I mean that in a literal sense, at least for the chorus. Let me explain... Nothing in this country is straight forward. Not ordering food. Not getting from one place to another. Not buying tickets. Not paying for things. Literally anything you can imagine gets more challenging with no verbal language, limited body language, no money and the Chinese culture. 

I'll start with the basic example of trying to get instructions out of people on the street... 'You're hot then you're cold, you're yes then you're no.' We would turn up to one bus station, and the locals would tell us to go to the train station. The attendants at the train station would tell us to go to a different bus station. At the second bus station, they tell us to go to the South Bus Station, so we ask for a second and third opinion before discovering that no buses go to our desired location because it's winter. 'You're in then you're out, you're up then you're down. You're wrong when it's right...' 

And that's only one example... We also went to this small town in The Middle of Nowhere, China (which took us 5 days to get to, but that's a story for another day). Only to find  when we arrived that we were cashless (in a cash only system) and no ATMs were reading our credit cards (i.e we were fucked). It was looking like two hungry girls and two cold nights under the stars. I spent a good portion of the evening the phone to the bank at home and visa, organising our emergency cash pick up. But come morning, the banks (which Visa International had told me I was to pick up my cash from) simply said no (much like the computer). To directly quote both banks I visited, 'our bank doesn't have that function, please go to the other bank.' To say I wanted to slap the bank tellers around would probably be the understatement of the century.


Ordinarily, I would say that I am a relatively patient (if not patient, at least calm) person. Not so in China. I have wanted to punch more people on this country in the last two weeks than I have at home in the last twenty years. Needless to say, China has a way of pressing people's buttons. The spitting doesn't help. But it's not all bad. The food is amazing. When you get somewhere epic, it is epic for sure. But getting to that epic place may just be the end of you. However, I resolve to continue to try and see the epic places here until I am ended. Even if the yes's are no's, the rights are wrongs, the ups are downs and the ins are outs.