Will we be kicked out of our hotel?

After my last post, we had settled in for the night to get some sleep before our 4:15 a.m. wake-up call when our phone rang at 9:15 p.m. It was the front desk clerk of our hotel calling to say that the "deposit" charged to my credit card that they had swiped upon our check-in was insufficient to cover our last night's stay at the hotel. I responded that I was checking out of the hotel at 5:30 a.m. the next morning and would be glad to pay the full bill at that time in the morning. The clerk responded by saying, "I'm sorry."


I clarified by saying, "S0 you are asking me to get out of bed and come down to the front desk to provide my credit card, that you already have on file, right now?" And she replied, "I'm sorry Ma'am." I thought for a few moments about how if I was in the U.S., I would have refused to go down and would have just paid my bill in the morning. However, after a couple of incidents where just after walking into my hotel room, my phone rang with someone from the front desk calling; those "big brother" electricity controls in the hotel room that indicate when you're there and not; and the "Great Firewall of China" which seemed to be tracking what I was accessing on the internet, I imagined Mom and Ahn-Bao and I being removed from our hotel room in the middle of the night by the Chinese army in their green coats with the red trim , our luggage being confiscated, or worse, I'd be arrested.


So I went to the front desk, in my pajamas (which was probably a risk in and of itself) and took the same Discover credit card that I had used at check-in and offered to pay the bill in full. But after the manager got on the phone for a few minutes, the clerk suggested that maybe I'd like to use another card or pay cash. I had made special arrangements with Discover Card in advance to allow use of the card in China, which they had assured me would be accepted just like a domestic China card called, UnionPay. I explained all of this to her and then remembered that I had a printout from Discover written in Chinese which explained the card and how to use it so I went back up to my room and got the explanation card and took it back down to the manager.

She looked at it, got on the phone again for what seemed like a long time, then finally agreed to swipe my card. I waited until she had agreed before I asked if I could pay part of my bill with my remaining Chinese Yuan so that I wouldn't have to take it home. It seemed a little ironic that after all the trouble I had during the first week getting access to Chinese Yuan, that I would be looking for a way to unload the stuff at this point.

A bit of advice to anyone going to China, make sure that the U.S. cash you take is really pretty money, clean bills with no stamps, writing, creases, or defacing of any kind. Crisp, clean hundred dollar bills are preferred by everyone in China, at least if you don't have crisp, clean 100 Yuans. Everywhere I exchanged money, at the Bank and the Hotels, the bills were examined from various angles, held up to the light, and bills with creases were rejected on at least two occassions. It's very amazing at how careless we are in the U.S. at how disrespectful to our currency.