There’s a list of scams a mile long to beware of.\u00a0 A big one is counterfeit money.\u00a0 The 50 and 100 note yuan are often passed along to unsuspecting people by the street vendors and taxi cab drivers.\u00a0 We need to keep an eye out for the color, the watermark, the paper, and the braille dots in the lower left corner of the front side.\u00a0 The color, apparently, is hard to imitate, and the watermark on fake ones is not clear.\u00a0 If we could\u00a0 carry around a black light,\u00a0 we could see if the paper was too bright.<\/p>\n
Then there’s the tea house scam.\u00a0 Tea houses are everywhere — pleasant respites to sip tea and relax in beautiful surroundings.\u00a0 But beware! Students “practicing their English” invite you to a tea tasting: trying different teas, learning about what ailments or parts of the body the teas were good for, what water temperature was appropriate for that tea, how to properly hold the cups, etc.\u00a0 Then at the end you are not only overcharged for the tea, but also charged for the room, the tea pot, the lesson, among other things.\u00a0 Duped tourists have been known to pay several hundred dollars!<\/p>\n
Of course, like in other countries, there are the taxi drivers who take you out of your way and add many miles to the trip.\u00a0 (Some rickshaw drivers do the same).\u00a0 The taxi drivers must have government licenses but some do not, and you have to be knowledgeable about what their license plates must look like.\u00a0 In China, well in Beijing and Shanghai anyway, all taxis charge you by the mile and sometimes by the minute (at red lights and in traffic jams — any time you’re traveling less than 12 km\/hour).\u00a0 The customer also pays for tolls.\u00a0 Government taxis all have machine printed receipts that spell out all the details of the fare so that’s another word to learn — “fapiao” (receipt).\u00a0 That way you have some recourse if you feel gypped.<\/p>\n
And\u00a0 there are the pickpockets!\u00a0 Everywhere. \u00a0 We must carry our passport, money, credit and debit cards, and all important papers with us at all times — in a “secret” security belt under our clothes.\u00a0 My backpack has steel enforced straps and hidden zippers and a way to hook it to my chair in a restaurant so it can’t be snatched away.\u00a0 Oh, the stories I’ve read from those who learned all these lessons the hard way.<\/p>\n
Might it be less dangerous to go swimming with the crocodiles in the Nile?!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s a list of scams a mile long to beware of.\u00a0 A big one is counterfeit money.\u00a0 The 50 and 100 note yuan are often passed along to unsuspecting people by the street vendors and taxi cab drivers.\u00a0 We need to keep an eye out for the color, the watermark, the paper, and the braille […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maxonweb.net\/chinablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maxonweb.net\/chinablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maxonweb.net\/chinablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maxonweb.net\/chinablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maxonweb.net\/chinablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/maxonweb.net\/chinablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72,"href":"https:\/\/maxonweb.net\/chinablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46\/revisions\/72"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maxonweb.net\/chinablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maxonweb.net\/chinablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maxonweb.net\/chinablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}