Here is one that can filed under ‘Customer’.
Yesterday I had a language exchange and we were looking for a new place to hold it in. We went to a tea shop. Xiamen has a profusion of these, many of them representing the family businesses of growers from around Fujian province, famous for its teas. The tea shop we went into not only sold tea but also had a number of small rooms upstairs where you could drink tea. We went to one of these and it was quite pleasant and productive. I drank and learnt a little about about ‘Gong fu cha’ or ‘kung fu tea’ known for killing not opponents but for killing time. It is the staple tea of the older folk down by the ferry who spend their afternoons playing games, drinking tea and chatting. The tea drinking room was bijou but comfortable and mercifully quiet. Most places I’ve been to play music or are somehow or another hectic in a different way. This room was not, so I profited from the silence which allowed me to listen to how I should be speaking Mandarin. The sting in the tail came upon going downstairs and paying. We made the mistake of not checking the price in advance. The lady who ran the shop then gave an absurdly high price which I was in no position to challenge so £17 poorer for the pot of tea, I paid up and left. What can I say except avoid the little tea shop by Jin Shan Xi Zhan on the 96 bus line in Xiamen… and always get the price up front otherwise it is liable to multiply.
I spoke to another friend about it and she told me it was unfortunate but that this does still happen, particularly to foreigners who are perceived as cash cows to be milked by some. She added however that it can also happen to Chinese people too. Her colleagues were once played the same trick in a restaurant in their own home city.
I had some similar experiences to this the first time I was in China but have experienced it less often recently so I was somewhat taken by surprise this time round. By creating a category that I will call ‘Customer’ maybe I can develop ways to either avoid or document this sort of thing and thus bring it back into the language of my project. I now regret not taking a receipt or a picture of the transaction, for example. In any case, I now have two examples to place here in the customer category: the tea shop by Jin Shan Xi Zhan and Air France/KLM. May they both wither!
On the subject of Air France/KLM, who cheated me so royally and who to be perfectly honest I am much more angry with, I have had no reply from either of their customer care departments. Nearly a month has passed since I first contacted them so I may need to send a reminder. What have I got to lose, except a little time?
