one world, one dream (part 1)

As Maya and I agreed over dinner on Thursday, as we looked at the menu of the restaurant we had stumbled into and eyed the photo of the turtle soup - which looked exactly like a turtle just cracked out of its shell and tossed whole into a bowl of broth - China was kicking our asses. It was just our first day in in the country, but we already felt like we had been there for a harrowing month (which is how long we are scheduled to be here on this insane trip of ours). And to think, it all started out so benignly. Maya and I had been nervous as our plane from Tokyo came into Beijing airport that early afternoon about going through the Chinese passport control, customs, and "quarantine" - China makes you fill out a form declaring that you don't have a whole range of ailments from HIV to psychosis to sneezing - but when we finally actually disembarked, the procedures proved to be as blase and perfunctory as in any other airport we'd ever been through. Call it the calm before the storm...

Two days before we were set to arrive in Beijing we had gotten an email from the hotel, Li Shi, which we had booked for our first week telling us that "the government is having a meeting" and had booked all the rooms, which meant that our reservations had to be bumped to the hotel's sister hotel, a place called Fangyuan. We frantically looked up online reviews of this sister hotel and shit didn't look so good, so we asked my friend Eveline (who has been living in Beijing for over a year now) to see if she could book us a room at the 7 Days Inn in her neighborhood, which she has heard from a friend is not a bad at all for a budget place in China. Unfortunately, said 7 Days Inn didn't have any rooms available for our first two days in town, so we decided we'd just have to brave Fangyuan. And it would end up taking every ounce of our courage.

First, our taxi driver could barely find the place, and when he finally did, the neighborhood looked sketchy at best - down nearby alleys we saw residential areas that were basically little shanty towns constructed from scraps. Then, the young, very bored, and very disinterested girl at the check-in counter turned out to have no record of our booking or any idea what we were talking about when we recounted the story of our original reservation, the email we received, etc. But she did give us an economy room for two nights (for around 238 yuan, approx $30, each night). Then she gave us our key and directed us to the basement; words can hardly capture the horror of the subterranean hallways that awaited us when we walked down the stairs - the ceiling sagged heavily in places, had gaping holes in others; the carpeting on the floor had huge black stains all over it; the wallpaper was peeling, the walls had holes in them; the door of one room appeared to have had its entire doorknob and lock torn right out, leaving a splintery maw in their place; and the whole place stunk. As I said to Maya, "It looks like the hotel in The Shining - except that hotel was nice." When we got to what was to be our room, the bedroom smelled thickly of cigarettes, while the bathroom smelled like shit, and the walls, floor, and ceiling were hardly in any better shape than those of the hallway outside, plus they were covered in mold. We decided quickly that we needed to see a different room.

So we returned to the visibly annoyed girl at check-in, who suggested the number of another available room. She called down to the housekeeper - a different but equally young girl, whom we had seen sitting with a slight, inscrutable smile on her face, at a desk in the middle of the basement hallway; she, the check-in girl said, would show the room to us. Meeting up with the housekeeper, who spoke no English as far we could tell, we followed her deep down the left end of the labyrinthine hallway to the very last room there - which, at first glance, actually looked endurable compared to the first. Then, as we began to unpack our shit, Maya discovered that the mattress of the bed was made of some mysteriously crunchy, painfully-hard styrofoam-liked material and had a large gully on the right side of it, while one of the pillowcases bore a suspiciously bloodstain-like blotch and some strands of hair. I was on the phone with Eveline, seeing when we could meet up and describing our hotel travails so far, when Maya said, "Is that a worm crawling on the bathroom floor?" I snatched up my eyeglasses and peered ahead - sure enough, a skinny, very energetic earthworm was wriggling along the dirty tiles, arching its head up like a Mini-Me cobra, apparently checking out its new home with much more enthusiasm than we were. A chill ran down my spine - as I've mentioned before, I really don't like legless slithering things like snakes and worms, and I definitely don't like them hanging out in my bathroom.

I slapped a teacup over the worm so that I could show it, alive and wriggling, to the hotel staff, and we returned to the frontdesk, finding there a new, even less friendly, and less English-language-savvy young woman. We complained about the mattress and I tried to explain about the worm; "A what?" she said. "A worm," I answered, inching my finger along the desk in an absurd pantomime. "A worm." Nope, no comprende. "Need see 'nother room?" she asked; exasperated, we nodded our heads. She called down to the housekeeper, who, with the same inscrutable look on her face, showed us to yet a new chamber. This one looked far superior to both the previous ones, though it was still far less hospitable/sanitary than anywhere Maya and I had ever stayed before: As in everywhere else in the hotel, the wallpaper was peeling off, there were holes and mold everywhere, and we were still totally sketched out. We gave her a beleaguered "Xie xie," ("Thank you"), the housekeeper returned to her desk, and we flopped down on one of the beds together - only after putting down our own sheets, which we'd wisely brought with us - utterly exhausted (we'd been up since 5am to catch our morning flight from Japan and were feeling worn out before any of this even went down).

After a little while, having failed to get any rest, we decided to try and find some food and an internet cafe - Maya's friend Fish was supposed to meet us in Beijing (he had timed his own, much shorter vacation to China with our first week and a half here) but he'd gone to Shanghai first and that city had been hit by a major typhoon leading to an evacuation of half the city and we hadn't been able to get in touch since; Maya was hoping for an email from him, or at least, to get the number of his hotel in Beijing so we could call and see if he'd made here.

As we redistributed some of our shit to our daypacks, Maya pulled a pair of underwear from her bag that were still wet from doing laundry in Japan, and since we didn't want to hang it on any of the existing surfaces in the room, which all appeared to be filthy, I decided to improvise a hanging line. We had some cord, which I strung from the lip of this glass shelf above our sink to the towel rack a few feet away. Mind you, the line was slack and the panties weighed next to nothing, but as soon as I stepped back from my setup, the shelf instantly pulled away from the wall, hit the floor, and shattered! The ceramic mugs on the shelf also shattered. I stared at the scene in total disbelief, as did Maya (who had run over, having heard the sound).

We called over the ever inscrutable housekeeper, who impassively swept up the wreckage, while we looked on and exchanged glances of "What the fuck?" Once she cleaned the scene of the crime, we quickly stuffed our daypacks with everything we had with us of any real value (very little, actually), and headed out into Beijing, eager to, at least temporarily, escape this Fangyuan hellhole, get some food, find Fish, and hopefully clear our heads... (to be continued)