It’s 2:30 AM. I am tired, hot, and grumpy as hell. I have no good will left, and so am stalking around the resort (1), a big white half-naked ball of smoldering fury, praying that someone challenges my presence. Not surprisingly, no one did. Matters were not improved when I finally emerged from the unnatural darkness and peered into the familiar glow of streetlights. I was right. It was only us.
The electricity went out at 11:00 last night, and hasn’t been back since. This means that we don’t have air conditioning in a climate where you can break a sweat while laying motionless on top of your covers. The secondary problem is that now I’m awake, and thirsty, the stores are closed, and I can’t use the electricity to boil myself some clean water. Thanks to my walk, I now knew that it wasn’t a regional blackout, but in fact very much the fault of our hotel. Ignorance may be bliss, but knowledge is a fiery inferno that keeps you company on a lonely night.
Generally speaking, I don’t consider myself a diva. I have been in much more discomfort than tonight, and in truth, my anger was not at a hotel that couldn’t keep its power on (2). My anger was at a hotel that has, over the past three days, gone out of its way to charge us for damages that we clearly did not incur, begrudgingly fed us sub-par food at inconvenient hours, closes its grocery store (our only access to water) during the “rest hours” of 9:30AM-6PM, and in general has tried to do its best to insure that we have as unpleasant an experience as possible. And now it has no power.
Allow me to widen the scope a bit.
In many ways, this vacation was a comedy of errors. Or perhaps a study in cultural contradictions. Mostly, though, I think it is just a big fatty monument to what an incompetent tool Mr. Dai is (3).
There is a great chasm that separates the Chinese and American perceptions of what a vacation should be. Americans want to “get away,” to barricade off a few days from their daily life and forget that there are such things as schedules and deadlines and bosses. Though the students have been having a lot of fun, they have spent a whirlwind three weeks blowing through the major cities and sites of China, and are ready for a little sedentary living.
Unfortunately, that is not the Chinese way. As best as I can tell, they go on vacation to get away from the routine of their days, to experience the excitement that can be found beyond the borders of their regular life. A Chinese vacation is a study in this-to-that-to-the other thing, trying to frantically squeeze it all in before the vacation ends and they board that last flight home. It might be because Chinese take fewer vacations, and so try to pack more into whatever time off they can get. It might just be a straight up inexplicable cultural thing. I don’t know. Either way, thanks to Mr. Dai’s maverick incompetence, we were saddled on a tour that we didn’t want, that wanted to keep us busy from 8AM-8PM with things that we didn’t want to see (coffee factories?), and kept us on a bus several hours a day. Thankfully we talked our way out of most of it, but every step was a struggle, every compromise the result of exhaustingly emphatic “discussion.”
It was an “all inclusive” tour, and so we couldn’t get away from the poor quality and money-grubbery that seemed indicative of every establishment that we patronized. I’m sure Hainan has delicious food, nice people, and passable accommodations, but we didn’t see any of them. We went to the tour hotels and ate the tour menus, where no one worried about what the customer wanted, because there was an endless string of tour groups still to come. Because everyone was getting kickbacks from everyone else, it was impossible to break the cycle and try to find something passable.
Which is why, at 2:30 in the morning, I was walking around the complex, livid. As a goodbye gift, the hotel tried to charge us for a toilet seat cover that someone didn’t notice was broken because they never tried to move the lid. Awesome.
(1) Ha. While technically, Haixia is, in fact, a resort, it is stretching the language to the limit. This refers strictly to the architectural layout of the facility, and is not meant in any way to infer the comfort, service, or general overall pleasantness usually associated with resorts.
(2) Or maybe who turned their power off to save energy. This was a hypothesis presented by a local, not the paranoid delusions of an over-entitled waiguoren.
(3) The Waiban representative who supervises the foreign students. In this case, he did not plan the vacation through Grins as he was asked, and did it himself. Much to our surprise and chagrin…
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