I CAME TO BEIJING FOREST AND LAND HOTEL...

and all I got was this stupid bike lock!!!!

D: I am not exactly sure where to start with this blog. All I can I say is that we might be wearing out welcome here in Beijing and might be leaving soon.

So, hmmmmmmm. Let's start at the very beginning. A couple days ago we go around looking for hotels because one we were staying at is loud and roaches are free to roam around on your bed. NOT COOL!!!!! So, we get lost in a hutong and run into a little place that is poppin' and called Forest and Land Hotel. Bill goes in and looks for a price and it was not reasonable. (You can haggle with these people, so anything above $35 was NOT reasonable) So, we get the guy, Harry, down to 200 yuan. The thing I VAUGELY remember is Bill telling me that we should never pay LESS than $35 dollars....this place $26.

B: I mean, what can you expect for less than that? But I got a little hypnotized by the thought of knocking $10 off our nightly bill -- I mean, that's two meals right there!

D: So, we move in the next day just thinking that this place hung the moon. Well, at about 6:30 am the next morning my opinion started to change. We were next to the maid station. I HAVE NEVER IN MY LIFE HEARD SO MUCH DANG RACKET AND DOOR SLAMMING IN MY LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I cannot emphasize how loud these ladies were. I can hear a mouse fart, so's I hears ever-thang! I go downstairs to explain the problem. I am very nice and polite, although I look liked death warmed over. You know, you can only be SO nice when you are met with laughs and grins and you have been woken up too dang early. I keep my cool and I bring the gentleman upstairs and "SHOW" him the issue. You are better off "showing" than trying to explain. I slam the door and get loud to explain that their maid sevice was loud. He apologized VERY quickly, but there was no return to sleepy-town. We go downstairs later on, with sugar in our veins, and demand a new room. They were quick to give us a new room and very apologetic. Sometimes, A LOT OF TIMES, you meet very sweet and accomodating Chinese that will do backflips if it will make you happy. THEN...you meet GOLIATH, that David (Bill) met today.

Bill got us a good deal...man, he is learning from the master (me)...how to bater and get dang near everything for free. I mean, everything's already made in China right? He got us a really good deal on some phonecards.

B: I learned the hard way. First I paid 1oo yuan ($13) for a 100 yuan phone card, about 41 minutes to America. Then I read the Lonely Planet book, it does come in handy sometimes, and found you should never pay more than 35 yuan for a 100 yuan card, and haven't since.

D: The first woman who sold us our 100 yuan phonecard saw "SUCKER" written on his forehead. Hey, we were just happy to get a card to call home!

We wake up this morning to make some calls, (sorry moms and dads) and he finds that the phonecards do not work as normal. He goes downstairs to get some help and is met with a bit of a roadblock. Bill is amazing at getting through roadblocks.

B: It's hard to explain, but the card we've been using to call home used to have a #1 for Mandarin, #2 for English option, but for some reason this morning it did not. I called the help line and they said that it had to do with the hotel phone being automatically set for Mandarin. We had not had this problem at either of our two previous hotels. The operator told me to talk to the hotel people and see if they could help.

Well, I walked down the stairs (we were on the fourth floor, no elevator) and they weren't much help, even after I put the girl at the front desk on the phone with the operator. Eventually, the front desk girl told me to try another phone in the hotel and sent me up to an empty room on the fourth floor. I made my way back up, but even though she sent me up there, she did not turn the phone on to make local calls. In Beijing, you have to have your phone turned on to make calls outside your hotel. It costs about 0.3 yuan ($0.04) cents per minute for a local call, and for that sometimes they make you leave a deposit.

By the time I made it back downstairs after my wasted trip up, I was livid. "Why would you send me all the way upstairs to use the phone if you didn't turn it on," I asked in my most measured and rage-concealed tone possible? (I'd been at this for probably an hour now.) She smiled and giggled. It is very frustrating to me not knowing if the person you're dealing with is being a bastard on purpose or is just trying their best to manage a conversation with an irate person in a foreign tongue and doesn't know any better.

Finally, I'd had enough. "I want our money back and we're going to another hotel," I say. (This place was shady for a lot of reasons, as Deni has mentioned. I mean, they had dog on the restaurant menu, for God's sake.)

D: I just had a feeling about this place. We have been in China for almost TWO WEEKS and THIS is the only place that had dog. We thought is was a joke!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NOT COOL!!!!!! R.I.P. BEVO!

B: The front desk girl apologized profusely and I backed off, I mean it wasn't her fault the phones didn't work right? Anyway, I call the operator again and about that time Deni D. comes down the stairs (she thought I'd got distracted checking my email!, whatever D). She's standing by my side when I hang up with the operator a second time, quite frustrated. I slam the phone down and by now a "manager" is there who doesn't like my attitude. He says something to me.

"You do not speak to him like that," D says. "We're customers. Don't you ever speak to your customers that way!"

Blah blah blah he goes on in Chinese. Screw this, we say, we're out of here. So D and I go upstairs and grab our stuff. We come back and demand the 200 yuan we'd paid for the next night and the 100 yuan deposit. He only wants to give us 200 because we'd "stayed a half day" (it was about an hour after noon at this point)

Not a smart move buddy. We might talk a lot about trying to avoid Americans and how we're annoyed by them, but we can sure make a scene like one when we need to (and there is 100 yuan -- $13 -- at stake).

We progressively get louder and louder with this guy in the middle of the reception area. He won't budge, and as we've mentioned before, any conversation with us in China usually attracts a crowd, so you can guess what this one was like.

"I ensure you that I will stand outside and make sure that not one more person stays a night at this hotel," Deni said.

"THREE-HUNDRED-YUAN," B said, in very slow and deliberate tones.

D: SLAM, SLAM, SLAM!!!!!!" went my hand on the counter. Do we like making a scene? NO! But do we like being taken advantage of? NO!

B: The girl I was originally dealing with tried to interject, explaining it was all her fault.

"No it's not," we said. "It's this guy's fault," pointing at the "manager." He wasn't actually the manager, we found out later, but he sure said he was at first.

As she tried to help, the guy put his hands on her and pushed her out of the way. That really set us off. We're afraid men get away with this all the time in China.

D: "DON'T YOU EVER PUT YOUR HANDS ON HER!!!!!" said D.

B: "You do not do that," we said to him.

"Oh no, it's my fault," the girl said.

"No it isn't, it's his."

Finally, we made enough noise and enough of a scene that a couple other employees showed up, one of whom also claimed to be the "manager". We couldn't understand what he said, but I knew he was saying 'just pay them off.'

So they did. And we left, but not till after mentioning a few more times to the girl that she should not allow someone to put his hand on her.

"Thank you, goodbye," they all said, over and over again until we were out the door, on our bikes and down the street.

We went straight to the hotel we should have stayed at in the first place.

Great people for the most part here in China, but they sure don't like a scene. Of course, you're always going to have someone who's the jerk.

Three months ago, before we left on this trip, I can't say I'd have fought like I did this morning. I'm glad I stuck to my guns. I have Deni D and Russia to thank for that. Pictures and babuska dolls aren't the only things we'll be taking home from this journey.

D: This blog seems like a drag to us, but this is the first encounter we have had with someone who is a jerk. We feel bad spaeking of it, but it needed to be said. We feel like after Russia everything was "sunshine and puppydogs!" as I say. But today was not and we do not like blogging about bad things. We just got in the groove blogging about bad things being in Russia where people were not kind to us. But not in China. People are amazing here and we thought long and hard about blogging this. It has to said though.

WE STILL LOVE CHINA!!!!!!!!

But we are probably leaving in a few days...for Xi'an and the Terracota Soliders.