100 RMB in the Subway

Yesterday, after leaving the internet cafe I go to for my post test celebration, I decided to stop and add some money to my subway card before boarding and heading home. I didn't need to, I still had enough money to last me for about a week, but I figured that now would be a good time since I wasn't in a hurry. I was wrong.


I followed all the instructions well, but when it came time to put in my money the machine took my 100RMB bill and didn't put the money on my card, just threw my card back out at me without asking me if I wanted to put the money on the card. I turned and asked the nearest Traffic Police attendant person what to do about it, and thus began what seemed like a gigantic event in their lives. I had witnesses to prove that I had put in my money, hadn't done anything wrong, and been cheated by the ominous machine, but still every person that came to investigate was incredulous that the machine could fail. How could the machine fail? It's the machine! It's new and improved and designed to make our lives either and would never betray us and cause us trouble! I feel, after writing that, that there is probably political satire in there somewhere, but I'm too lazy to find it and make it less obvious or more crafty since it wasn't really intentional. In any case, more and more higher ups kept coming down from wherever they come from, each one having the same investigation progress:

Oh you speak Chinese? Good! Your card didn't get the money? Well let's look for ourselves. Hm, you're right, no money. You followed the instructions correctly? Okay, that can't be. Oh these witnesses say you did it right? Okay, this is odd, let me talk to someone else, please wait a moment.

I waited for about 2 hours as different people came and went, and really I didn't care about the money in the end I just wanted to get on the train. They, however, had committed to solving the foreigners problem and they were determined not to be denied. They went behind the machine and took out parts of it trying to get the money thing open. After what must have been a long time fiddling with that, it was evident they didn't know how to get it open and weren't going to succeed. One of the ladies with relatively high status as indicated by her armband and some stars on her shirt asked me if I was sure I had put the money in, and if so perhaps the thing had spit the money back out onto and it had been blown in a breeze onto the floor. I wanted to tell her I wasn't retarded, and that for it to both spit out the money and then that money to be taken by a strong enough breeze to fall down I would need to have a severe problem, as the money accepting slot is in the middle of the machine and I never looked away. I indulged her though, and let her and 4 other police officers crawl around on the floor searching. It was touching.

In the end, the machine defeated them. They could not manage to make it cooperate. They took my phone number and said they'd call me today to get my money back to me, finally letting me go on my way. I'm fairly certain I won't see that 100RMB again, but I'm glad they at least let me go. The one thing I kept thinking throughout the entire ordeal was what if I were a foreigner who didn't speak Chinese? The main reason I got the level of help I did was because my Chinese was good enough to poke holes in their dumb theories and explain what the real problem was, if I were just a foreigner I wonder how fantastically blown out of control things would have gotten. A man can dream.

On a quick after note, Ron from Hangzhou (from America) came to Beijing to visit for a bit. We went to an awesome restaurant last night specializing in spicy stuff and something called ma, which they think is spicy but is in fact a tool of the devil. This is a taste/effect that American food does not have, it is a type of spicy that after eating sometimes causes the wasabi like sinus clean out, but then the real effect kicks in as you start getting weird tingles on your tongue or lips as though your mouth were going to sleep. To round it out, the taste is pretty good, too, so I take it as a challenge to see how much crazy ma la stuff I can eat whenever we go somewhere like this. I forgot to take my camera because I am an idiot, but we ate some excellent (read, expensive) fish, some vegetables, rabbit meat, and snail. The snail was excellent, it came with a plastic glove and skewer to wear and you had to work it out of its shell before you could eat it. It tasted amazing. The rabbit was the most punishing of the dishes, it came last and was just swimming in the peppers that give the dishes their signature taste. Slowly people around the table tapped out as they reached their limit of spicy/ma la, and it was up to me to finish the dish. The end result was us walking away from the with runny noses, sweating, and drooling uncontrollably trying to fan ourselves as we set off on a quest for ice cream and water.

It was a good night.