After I got cleaned up in my hotel room my guide for the evening, another teacher from the school named Sunny, took me out to buy a cell phone. Fortunately, my guide has never been to this neighborhood so we decided we would do an exploration.
We took off down the street from my hotel, Motel 168 Super, which is on something of a main road I think. Aparerntly that's not enough to keep a little shopping district at bay. Seriously, like two blocks away from my hotel there's an area with tons of store fronts and street vendors. Lots of people. I actually learned a phrase on the cab ride to my hotel: "人海人山." It means "People Mountain, People Sea." It's a how most Beijing citizens feel about the population. The shops had EVERYTHING. I saw phones and bikes and underwear and flashlights and trinkets and all manner of stuff. Sunny led me into a little store that had cell phones. She told me it wasn't good because they didn't carry famous brands and suspected the phones wouldn't work. I trailed along obediently. It's China and I've been here for like, four hours. I have no idea what's going on.
Anyway, we got a little lost for awhile but everyone she asked for directions was very helpful (I presume) because eventually we crossed a bridge and ended up in front of this gigantic mall. Seriously, bigger than Water Tower Plaza, smaller than Mall of America. Anyway, we found that there's a reputable electronics dealer on the third story and we went up. My requests for a phone were simple: I need an English interface, GPS, and a translator. Basically, I needed a smart phone. I kept picking up phones with a "how about this one" look as I tried to find something suitable and not too terribly expensive. Eventually, and I mean EVENTUALLY, we settled on a Lenovo model that seemed to fit the bill. I thought we were all set but we needed a SIM card and apparently the official ones are really expensive and don't get you a lot of talk time/ data. So where did we go for a SIM card?
We went to the newspaper stand outside of the mall. Yup, the vendor had a blue plastic grocery sack full of SIM cards and a hand written sheet of the available phone numbers. I chose one at random and Sunny was taken aback: I'd chosen a number with two "4's". Very unlucky in China.
CHINA FUN FACT: The word for "four" is very close to the word for "death." It's the same word with a different tone. A number with no fours in it cost twenty extra yuan.
I decided to risk the bad luck and get the cheap one. We took our SIM card and went back into the phone store (where we'd left the phone to charge), handed over the SIM card, and got all set up. This process took about two and a half hours with walking and haggling and generally being confused. That's a long two and a half hours after a twelve hour flight.
As it stands: I have no idea how to use my phone. The interface is in English but anytime I open an app, that menu is still in Mandarin. Sunny! Help!
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