I Was In Fact Me

I took a photo of my car, before we left.  Coming in a 2:00AM to the Beijing Capital Airport, about fourteen hours later then our scheduled arrival, via Bangkok, instead of direct from Vienna, I was glad at least I wouldn’t have to talk to a disappointed Beijing cab driver who would complain that he’d been in line for two hours and now, here I was asking him to drive for twenty minutes instead of forty, and yeah, isn’t life awful, until I barked something snarky in contempt.  “Do you have the key?”  This evening we’ll drive ourselves. 

I suppose I was lucky to be here.  The gent at border control had looked at my passport and looked at me and looked at my passport and looked at me, and looked at my passport and looked at me and said:  “Do you have another picture ID.”  I pointed out the fact that I was in fact me.  That was in fact me.  He persisted.  I did as well.  Fortunately my wife was behind me in line so I resisted the urge to say: “No.  I have no other ID.” Just to see what would happen.     Rather I pulled out my U.S. driver’s license, which seemed to mollify him.  Pulling it out I said to him in Chinese that all foreigners look alike anyway, so what does it matter.  This made him laugh, though that wasn’t my intention. 

We managed to find the car without consulting the photograph.  Take a right, and then another right and at this hour there are only so many cars out there in the lot.  We debated just how long it was we had left the car here and how much they’d be expecting let us pass through the gate.  Are they going to count it as five days or six?  This was all rather relevant as threw the bags in the car and remembered that we’d driven over on a near empty tank of gas and neither the toll gate lady nor the gas guy would be able to process my foreign credit card.  We’d need to make it work with the cash on hand.

The hapless 2:30AM tollbooth lady demanded four hundred yuan at the same time the machine barked out this figure.  I guess we were lucky, stuck only for the five-day charge.  Ah, but the gal rejected one of our one hundred yuan notes.  “It’s frayed.” she pointed out.  “What else ya’ got?” 

We gave her the other notes we had that totalled as much and took back the rejected one hundred yuan note.  Yes, the gas station will be open.” My wife assured me, with supreme confidence.  But neither of us was sure if the filling station attendant would accept our once forsaken one hundred renminbi note. 

Wednesday, 03/22/17