Tian'anmen Rickshaw Wang Fu Qing 呆子

The trek from the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City to Tian'anmen is a short, but painful one when you're wearing the 'gladiator slippers' that're all the rave in London this summer!

En route yesterday, we noticed a queue forming in front of a ticket booth, above which was a sign saying "Tickets for Tian'anmen Gate" or something to that effect. So we joined the queue (as Tian'anmen was where we were headed), and paid 30 Yuan to yet another nasty cow who had begun to yell at me for having the audacity to show her an international student card in the attempt to obtain a student discount. Apparently I should've known from the Mandarin characters for 'Student Discount' that they meant Chinese students and not international ones. I felt like yelling "Oi Dummy, do I look like I speak Mandarin?" She should even have been grateful that we understood her at all! B may be Chinese, but she's spent her entire life in English-speaking Malaysia, and as a consequence, her Mandarin is appalling - It's part of the reason why she's living in Beijing at the moment. Today for example, she finally learned the Mandarin word for 'spoon' after a 20 minute signing and guessing game with a waitress in a cafe!

After our Tian'anmen Gate tickets were thrown at us, we carried on. We went through one gate, walked over a mini-bridge and found ourselves facing Tian'anmen Square. A little puzzled, we looked behind to find that the gate we'd passed through unchecked (and through which dozens of others were passing freely) was in fact the Tian'anmen Gate, as from where we stood we could see the gigantic gold-framed portrait of Chairman Mao beaming down at us! From that point up until Tian'anmen Square, there was no ticket barrier or gate or anything! We'd basically given the nasty lady who yelled at us 30 Yuan for nothing!

That was the first Olodo incident of the day.

Before I move onto the next, I would just like to say that I really did feel my inner revolutionary spirit stirring as I stood in Tian'anmen Square. Obviously I would never be the kind of revolutionary to stand poe-faced in front of a line of army tanks that'd been ordered to squash me flat! But I definitely could be one of those who marches and protests with tons of flags, whistling and singing! The camaraderie would be such fun!

The second Olodo incident crept up on us a lot slower than the first. After a hilarious stint at kite-flying in Tian'anmen, we went in search of a Hutong. A 'hutong' is basically a street or collection of streets that forms part of Old Beijing. Some of the houses in hutongs date back hundreds of years, but in general they provide a look at living arrangements of the factory worker classes in Beijing.

Our taxi dropped us off on a deserted street, pointed to a sign that said 'Hutong' and zoomed off. Being the David Livingstone of the duo, I managed to chase down a rickshaw, which was what my travel guide had said would take us round the "fascinating" hutongs of Beijing. The rickshaw driver showed us a sheet with 8 pictures on it. He pointed at it, said 50 Yuan, and we hopped in.

At first it was very interesting (and perhaps you could even say thought-provoking) to drive round these very impoverished parts of Beijing. Some of the buildings the rickshaw driver pointed out had one or two features that were similar to those in the Imperial Palace, but they really were very few and far between. I also didn't feel comfortable poking my nose into the lives of ordinary people and observing them as though they were a bunch of lab mice to be marveled at! After about 20 minutes, we were completely bored out of our minds as it was the same thing over and over again. We did go to one trade street which had a lot of artwork and fans, silk screens etc for sale, but after that it was snore, snore, smelly pong, smelly pong, and it didn't look like the ride was ever going to stop.

After about an hour and a half, the rickshaw driver announced that the tour was over, and it took a lot not to shout with glee at the news. Our joy was short-lived however, as he then held up a few fingers and said "400 YUAN Pleez!" Apparently when we chartered his fine chariot he had pointed at each picture on his crummy plastic sheet as a way of explaining that a visit to each "highlight" on the sheet would cost 50 Yuan. If you remember, I said there were 8 pictures on the sheet he showed us at the start. Rickshaw-man had then taken the liberty of showing us each and every single one of the snore-inducing highlights, wasting an hour and a half of our precious time, whilst we'd been thinking "Can you just hurry up and get this over with? Oh well, it's only 50 Yuan so who cares." We hadn't even climbed out of the rickshaw at some of the spots for which he wanted to charge us 50 Yuan! Many times when he stopped his stupid rickshaw and told us how special and "velly ancient" the site was, we just nodded and refused to get out of the rickshaw, indicating that he should carry on so we could be on our way!

One thing I can say for myself though is that I may be a spoilt brat but I am certainly not a dumb brat, and when it comes to being ripped off or wilfully deceived by crafty rickshaw drivers after smelly hutong rides, my hardcore Omo Naija mentality kicks in. Even though I was pissed off, I told B we were paying 100 each and that was it! I understood that he'd broken his back driving us around the hutongs, but he had told us it would cost 50 Yuan and we had not asked him to take the liberty of showing us so many things the significance of which we weren't even aware! B, who's always one for giving in because she'd rather be sitting in an air-conditioned room than sweating and fighting with a poor man on the street, wanted us to just pay him and hop in a taxi. I gave him the 200 we had amassed, he yelled "400, 400, okay 300, wan more 100". I groped in my handbag for a handful of notes, tossed him 50 Yuan and then stormed off.

The third and final Olodo moment came at Wang Fu Qing, which is an area that I suppose you could say is being developed as the shopping mecca of Beijing. It reminded me a lot of Lagos - massive and gigantic malls still under construction, with only a handful of them being used under all the scaffolding and saw dust. The two malls we went into were very nice though, but I was starving and all I cared about was food.

After dinner, we went into an electronic shop next door to the restaurant, as I wanted to buy a memory stick for my camera. I wanted a 2GB one and the most reasonably priced one was from some 'Kingston' (a brand I'd never heard of before), at 720 Yuan. The shop lady pulled out a calculator (I have now learned this is a regular trick in Beijing), punched in some numbers and said I should pay 600 Yuan. B, who's motto is, "Buy it, buy it, just hurry up", said it seemed reasonable enough to her, and after making sure the card worked with my camera, I thought, "What the heck."

We left the mall, me feeling proud at being a smartie who buys electronic gear in Beijing thus halving London's ridiculous prices, B looking anxiously for a taxi rank, and then spied a slightly more rundown-looking electronic shop in a row of kitschy shops. I was considering buying a video camera at the time, so we went in to find out how much one of the made in China brands would cost. A 2GB Kingston memory stick like the one I had just bought was shining in the display cabinet, next to one from ScanDisk (a brand I do know). I asked the shop lady how much the ScanDisk one was, she said 380. B and I were like "Whaaat?" I then pointed at the Kingston one, at which shop lady smiled and said "360 Yuan".

Apparently shops inside the malls see foreigners and other mumus like myself, bombard them with promises of air-conditioning and cheesy shop music, and then feel entitled to charge almost double the price an item is actually worth! So to break it down to those non maths wizards out there, I paid over 45 pounds for a memory stick that should've cost only 19 pounds!

The Chinese character in my title can be taken to mean either 'Idiot', 'Fool' or 'Sucker'. Appropriate isn't it?

To The Great Wall and Ming Dynasty Tombs tomorrow, I can only wonder what other experiences await me!