i really do love the people in dalian. i was talking to one of my students, and he told me that the way people treated each other in southern china was not as well as the way people treat each other in northern china. he didn't know how to describe what the north had over the south, so he used his little handheld translator to translate a chinese phrase, which came out as 'code of brotherhood', lol. maybe there's just a rivalry thing going on like that between the north and the south, i don't know, but i do think it is a little bit like that in the north.
a day in the life here. 2 very kind things in the past 2 days-
first, there is a little shop on the first floor on my building which is not that well stocked (because it's so small) but you can find the basics there- water, juice, instant noodles, TP, candy, etc. i don't go in there very often but i am on friendly terms with the woman who works there. she is literally in that shop ALL DAY LONG. and night too. i swear it's only closed like 4 or 5 hours a day and she is almost always there. i can't even imagine, i would go crazy. she has a little bunk bed off to the side that i see her dozing in sometimes, and at night i see a few of them making food in there. she might live in there, i really have no idea.
i went in there yesterday to get some bottled waters because my big water cooler is empty. i asked her if i could have 3 waters. she gave them to me and i asked her how much that would be. she waved at me very casually and indicated that she did not want any money. i was very surprised and confused so i just sort of stood there and didn't know what to say. this woman sits in there all day long to make a little bit of money, how is she not going to charge me anything?! so i just said 'oh my god' (which is very fun to say by the way- wo de tian a!), and she started pushing me out of the store so there wasn't really anything i could do. i had a brief thought when i got upstairs that maybe the waters were bad and they had just filled them with tap water and closed them tightly (which i heard happens here sometimes) so they didn't want to charge me, but i checked them and they were all fine. still don't understand the gesture as i've paid for things in there before, but it was very kind.
second thing that happened yesterday- i had to take a taxi to a location i've never been before, and the taxi driver offered me a price rather than going on the meter. very rarely do taxi drivers do this in dalian, so i was a little skeptical, but i knew the place was pretty far away and the price he offered me (20 kuai) seemed about right. i had my eye on him though because he seemed a little smarmy.
throughout the journey i kept quiet, and 2 other people hopped in during it. the first person wasn't going very far, and got out soon thereafter. the second person also got out before me, and i noticed that the taxi driver asked him for 15 kuai. almost immediately after the 2nd person got out the taxi driver indicated that we were at the housing development i was going to. i guess he had to drive around it to get to the entrance though, because he didn't tell me to get out. since we had some time, i decided to be cheeky and asked him in a why he charged that guy 15 kuai and was going to charge me 20 kuai. the taxi driver looked surprised and laughed, and told me that it was because when he picked me up i was just one person. fair enough. i was thinking about asking him if i could pay 15 kuai as well, but decided to let it slide since he hadn't intentionally been trying to rip me off in the first place and i agreed to the 20 kuai. plus, the difference between 15 and 20 kuai is less than a dollar. then he started asking me the standard questions- where are you from, what do you do here, etc. until we got to the gate. i paid the 20 kuai, but after i got out he called me to come back to the taxi. he had my wallet in his hand- apparently it had dropped out of my bag when i was getting out. guess he wasn't smarmy after all. i was so grateful to him...
i think part of the reason this amazes me, especially now, is that when i was traveling through vietnam, cambodia and thailand this month, a lot of the time i felt like i was walking around with big dollar signs painted on my head. i don't get this feeling as much in northern china. i think about the first taxi ride i took out of the airport in vietnam and how bad the guy ripped me off and i have no doubt that if i had dropped my wallet in his taxi i would have never seen it again.
with the taxi example yesterday, i think there are 2 factors which saved my wallet. the first is that i was friendly to him. when i confronted him about the price difference, which was certainly called for, i did it in a "are you for real" kind of voice but i did it with a smile. if i had gotten very defensive about it and accused him of cheating me, i don't think he would have wanted to talk to me, and probably would have sped off with my wallet. the second thing is i showed him that i was attempting to learn the language. the assumption here is that foreigners can not speak chinese, so if you show them that you can (even if it's just a little), they feel very, very happy.
so, how is someone going to steal from a nice foreigner who is trying their hardest to learn your (very difficult) language?! lol
No comments:
Post a Comment