What's Wrong WIth This Picture ?

Here's a story that is kinda related to our trip to Hainan, but not really......

Look at the photo at the top?  Do you see anything wrong?  Anything? Anything? Bueller?  Bueller?

As a Westerner in Suzhou, it is easy to form the impression that China has adopted and adapted to Western culture to the point of complete comfort.  After all, the city is full of Western companies and Western restaurants and there is no shortage of English-speaking-Chinese people in the hotels and restaurants.  It seems as if China has become a cosmopolitan melting pot and it's people are fluent in all the ways of the world.

But that's not completely true.

The fact is that there is only a thin veneer that specializes in dealing with the Westerners.  Don't get me wrong, China is developing remarkably fast...but it is developing as China, and not some hybrid love-child from a marriage between East and West.   I think the vast bulk of the population never sees a foreigner.  And those that do have consciously chosen to work for an international company, or consciously chosen to work in the western-oriented service industries that take care of the visitors that come with the international companies.

If Theresa and I would have decided to go to Hainan on our own, then we would have contacted one of the local travel agencies that advertises in the local English magazine.  We would have visited them, talked to them in English, and they would have taken care of us.  It would seem natural and normal.  And we probably would have no idea whether we were getting a good deal or not.

Our trip to Hainan was organized by our co-workers at the plant site.....by Chinese people who went to a travel agency....a normal travel agency....and not one that expected to charge a premium for helping gullible foreigners.  They worked out a good deal which allowed us to travel to Hainan for a price that I'd never be able to negotiate on my own.

There was an odd thing about the experience, though.   Since the travel agents had to arrange the airplane tickets, they asked all the travellers to provide our names exactly as they appeared in our passports....which Theresa and I did.  When we were given our boarding passes at the airport, Theresa and I were horrified to realize that the travel agency did not know how Western names work.  They assumed our names worked just like all the other Chinese names in our tour group... where the family name comes first and then the given name come after. 

So, that's what's wrong with the opening photo.  Instead of getting boarding passes that said "Weber/Theresa" and "Weber"/James" we got ones that said "Theresa/Ann" and "James/Clarence".  Compare the photo at the top (the screwed up names for Hainan) with the photo below (which was booked through the US and done correctly.)

I figured that there was no way we would get through security at the airport.  In the US, if the name on your boarding pass does not perfectly match your ID card then the security guys will bounce you in a heartbeat.  Trying to travel under a wrong last name is probably enough to get you on a TSA watch list.  But luckily, we were in Shanghai (and not Chicago) and we were taking a domestic flight from the domestic terminal where 99% of the travellers are Chinese.   The security guards checked our passports against the boarding passes and never batted an eye.  It looked perfect to them too.

There was one other strange thing about the trip.  If it was me making travel arrangements on my own, I would have had to pay the travel agency up front with a credit card.  However, the arrangement struck between the Chinese and this travel agent was that everyone would pay cash before getting on the bus to go to the airport.  3200 RMB per person was the cost.  So for 30+ people, the tour guide ended up collecting quite a bit of cash - almost 100,000 RMB or $16,000. 

And 100,000 RMB is REALLY a lot of cash to carry.  In China, the largest bill they make is a 100 RMB note.  Theresa and I alone turned in a stack of 64 bills to cover our cost.  By the time the agent collected all the cash, he had roughly 1000 bills to carry around.  It looked like a stack of bricks.