We arrived in Beijing 5 weeks ago as trusting, polite and honest people. Tomorrow, we leave this city guarded, suspicious and with a little less self-respect for practicing bad manners on purpose. We are so sick and tired of the dishonest and sly way of doing business here in China. Everyone and anyone who is not a friend tries to take advantage of you for even the littlest gain.
Tonight our goal was to get back our 400 USD security deposit from our apartment manager, Mr. Huang. In the 7 months we've been traveling to countries across the world we've never had any problem getting back our security deposit, but throughout our stay in Beijing our friends have been warning us about how it's a definite possibility our apartment manager will try to swindle us out of our deposit. We are leaving early tomorrow morning and suspected that if we agreed to do the walk-through tomorrow Mr. Huang may not show up at the agreed meeting time for whatever reason hoping that we'll abandon the deposit in favor of catching our flight to London. As predicted, our meeting tonight was an epic showdown that required a lot of shouting, a bit of psychology, emergency re-enforcements on speed dial and a good cop, bad cop routine (J was the good cop; I was the bad cop.).
The story is very interesting, but too complicated to write about here. However, I am happy to report that in the end we were victorious and got our security deposit back! As a precaution we decided not to stay in the apartment tonight in case Mr. Huang decided to hire some thugs to break into the apartment and beat us up as revenge.
If we come home with lingering ill manners picked up from Beijing, slap us straight. You'll be doing us a favor.
Current Location: Beijing, China.