Banks... again

The last couple of days I have been mainly spending time at home and relaxing. Most of the shops have opened now, so I head to my local noodle shop every day for my 3RMB noodles. This is the best deal around town that you will find and the noodles are much better than other more expensive places that I have visited. Therefore this has become my local now. For 5.50RMB I can have a beer and a bowl of noodles! In some shops this is the price of one single beer. So I am a local there now and every now and again me and the shop owners share a couple of words.

I am sitting in McDonald’s at the moment for a coffee. They serve the best coffee in town. I have been told that KFC has good coffee as well, so I will need to venture there sometime to see if the information is correct. But for time being I am a McDonald’s fan and client. I don’t eat there, I just drink their coffee. This is the couple of minutes I grant myself in the western world, sitting in McDonald’s with a coffee in hand and typing on my laptop. There is probably some other places around that serve good coffee, but their prices are ridiculous.

Sorry for the delay, it is now two days after I initially started writing the top two paragraphs. My computer just crashed on me in McDonald’s. Or rather the battery ran out. It used to have a battery life of 2 hours, but it looks like I might need a new battery as it only lasts 10 minutes now. Good thing it is "Made in China", might be able to get a good deal here. Things are going great here apart from the Banks that are still killing me. You need to know that when you travel from province to province the same bank’s branches are not connected. I found this out the hard way only to wait a week for my money from Shanxi province and for the service charge of 45RMB. Oh yes, and you have to cough up the money first before they will do your transaction. Mmm… it was also a good thing my Chinese is very bad otherwise I would have said a couple of things to the cashier that I would have later regretted. I think my translator saw the anger and the good thing is that she understood the frustration as she had a running with a bank a while ago.

Well, to put it like this. Someone stole her wallet with all her cards and money. So she headed to the bank to close her account only to find that she is not able to close her account without her ID card, and off course her ID card was in her wallet which got stolen. You see the frustration!! So she had to go to a different province, get a new ID card and close her account. They don’t just cancel the old card and give you a new one, no; you have to open a new account. So a week later she cancelled her account, opened a new account which cost her 10RMB and got a card which cost her another 10RMB. Ohh.. I would have been red in the face. Maybe this is a good place to work on patience.

Linyi City, Shandong Province, China