En route to Tokyo... a salutary tale

Bangkok (flight) - Hanoi [Vietnam]; Halong Bay (boat tour); Hanoi (bus) - Nanning [China]; Nanning (train) - Hangzhou; Hangzhou (train) - Shanghai; Shanghai ('Hua Lua Zhou' ship) - Osaka [Japan]; Osaka (bus) - Tokyo.

My itinerary for travel++++++ing from Bangkok to Tokyo in time to meet my bike
(which was being shipped between the two capitals) went to plan perfectly -
I should be a travel agent! 

SHANGHAI:

As this part of my trip had very little to do with motorbiking, I was going to spare you a long account. However, since I look upon it as my inherent duty to relate any events which may, in time, act as a warning to others perhaps venturing on my path, I find it necessary to mention a particular incident taking place in Shanghai, where I narrowly avoided falling foul of a fruit-salad.

Being of a trusting nature and having already become accustomed to the exceptionally friendly character of Shanghai residents, I was wholly unsuspicious when a young woman approached me on the neon-decked tourist boulevard, Nanjing road, and began chatting away, presumably to practice her English.

Having walked and talked for about ten minutes, she asked if I’d like to get a cup of tea. Pleased to have made another Shanghai acquaintance, I readily accepted and was directly led into a department store which 'fortunately' housed a café on the 7th floor. Having seated ourselves by the window (of the bar, rather than café), overlooking the crowds of shoppers and flashing illboards of Nanjing road, I glanced at the menu and ordered a beer, while my friend (Chinese names are impossible to remember) murmured something about a coke and relayed our order in Chinese to the waitress.

An insatiable talker, my new friend was guiding me through the intricacies of 'Campbell Soup Co.', her professed employer, when she was interrupted by the arrival of our drinks, which, rather surprisingly, came accompanied by a rather fancily presented fruit-salad. Thinking that this must be the Shanghai equivalent to a bowl of complimentary peanuts, I turned my attention from mushroom soup to the free fruit before me.

While happily chomping on a triangle of watermelon and nodding in agreement that mulligatawny was too much of a verbal mouthful to be a hit in China, we were both abruptly stunned into silence by a sudden commotion rising up from the couple on the table directly opposite us. Based on the assumption that the man must have merely made some kind of inappropriate comment to his date, I was taken aback when he stood up and, with a look of heightened desperation, shouted 'Help me!', while imploringly searching the faces of the whole bar of bewildered onlookers, who, myself included, immediately
became captivated by the room’s colourful floor tiles.

Unanimous attention was once again flung back on the scene, however, when the man’s date, also on her feet and looking dangerously fierce, started swinging her handbag at the man’s head like a ball and chain, endeavouring, with some success, to dislodge his glasses and batter his face with her sizable collection of make-up and beauty accessories. Being the nearest person to this bloodthirsty violence, I was unsure whether to intervene or back away to avoid stray handbag oscillations. Deciding not to rush into any unnecessary action, I took another piece of watermelon and continued observing.

The cavalry soon arrived in the form of two heckling waitresses (who had immediately sided with the girl) and a large, extremely gruff looking manager who, without delay, forcibly tried to grab hold of the man and tug him out from behind the table (while making sure not to make to much of an effort so to avoid embarrassing himself in front of the crowd of entranced spectators).

The man, wiping his face from a glass of beer chucked over him by his date, (who was now beyond irate and in a state of utter fury), suddenly turned to me, his closest potential ally, and once again cried 'Help me! Please!' Shocked by this highly distressed personal call for help but not particularly wanting to get involved, I rather meekly replied, 'Erm…well, erm…what exactly do you want me to-' But he'd stopped listening to me, he was concentrating on the lay out of my table, his eyes especially focused on my half-eaten fruit salad.

'Where did you meet her?' he frantically demanded, pointing to the girl I was with. About to reply, I briefly glanced to my left and was shocked to find the girl I’d just met, staring fixedly at the man with such an expression of venomous hatred that I could barely recognise her face.

Slowly turning back to the man I replied, 'Erm, just out there', pointing to the window. 'You’re being set up!' He yelled, over the tirade of abuse coming from the other side of the table, 'It's the fruit salad! Don’t pay, you must get out!'

At this, my former friend, in her fury, suddenly rose up and lunged at him, seeming as though she wanted to scratch his eyeballs out. He dodged, but in doing so, drifted within range of the manager’s strong grasps which yanked im out from behind the table, leaving him scrambling to get up off the floor, at the mercy of the ferocious women with their hurls of abuse, handbags and the odd tangerine segment.

Unbelievably, as soon as the man finally found his feet, he didn’t rush for the door, but begged me to go and find some policemen while he found another table to clamp his hands onto in bitter resistance.

With the livid manager, by now the colour of a bruised beetroot, manoeuvring himself to prise his unwanted patron off the furniture, I intervened, alarmed at the pure terror in the man’s eyes. With the table forcing a short-lived stalemate, I tried to discover what had driven this guy to act in such a way and why he didn’t just leave. In reply, he hastily told me how he’d met a friendly girl outside, she’d invited him in for a beer, she’d said she was only ordering a coke but this mysterious fruit-salad turned up with their drinks and he was now expected to pay $200 for it. Slightly perturbed by the familiarity of this narration, I glanced over to his table to find the remnants of an exact replica of my own table. He went on to say that he was refusing to leave because he was terrified that, once out of public view, he would be forcibly escorted to a back room and beaten up and robbed, adding that he'd not only heard of such things happening, but had even heard the manager instruct one of the waitress' to take him to a private room. As if to cement his suspicions, he pointed to two burly fellows waiting awkwardly at the door.

Unsure whether to believe all this or not, but happy to sacrifice further soup-talk, I agreed to leave the place with the man (Ivan, from Taiwan), as he doubted that they would ambush him if he wasn't alone when leaving the building. He quickly paid the few dollars for his beer and I ordered my bill. I was shocked to discover that, despite such a public scene, they’d tried to charge me over a hundred dollars for a beer, a coke and this ridiculous fruit-salad. The girl I’d been with looked decidedly sheepish and tried to confuse me with the Chinese bill, but, disgusted by the shameless extortion, I threw down just over 10 dollars, definitely enough for a beer and a few slices of watermelon, and left with Ivan.

After quite possibly the most uncomfortable lift experience I’ve ever had, where Ivan and I had to share that confined space with his former date, whose rage had now escalated to that of a rabid dog, we finally made it to safety outside the building.

Just as we were considering whether we should disperse into the crowd or go to the police, a slightly-built Korean man in his 50’s approached us, holding out a receipt. 'You haven’t just come from the 7th floor, have you?' he asked, and continued, 'met a girl, she invite you up there?' 'She didn’t order a fruit-salad, did she?' I interjected, 'Er, yeah', he said, looking slightly embarrassed, 'a rather expensive one actually', and he handed over a receipt for an astonishing 6,000Yuan, almost $1000! 'I know', he added, judging our appalled expressions, 'and all I had was a watermelon juice!'

At this, Ivan sprung into action and marched the Korean (who’d introduced himself as Kim) and myself over to a couple of policemen forming an island in the sea of bustling night-shoppers. The police were surprisingly cooperative and agreed to go back to the bar with us and demand Kim’s money back. Back on Floor 7 we bumped into two Japanese who were arguing with a waitress about their credit card receipt. When they saw us with the police they asked us what we were doing – all it took was for someone to say 'fruit-salad?' and they had joined us, telling tales of a friendly girl, a plate of fruit and a $500 bill.

After a good deal of arguing and negotiation with a younger man (not the original manager) of a muscular build and covered in tattoos (I was starting to believe Ivan’s fears that this place was run by organised criminals), Kim and the Japanese finally got their money back. I was eager (perhaps naively) to tell the police the full story of the outrageously blatant teamwork between the bar and girls picking up tourists on the street, but Ivan repeatedly checked me, whispering that he was positive the police collected their own commission too and all we should concentrate on was retrieving Kim’s money.

In retrospect, the sheer audacity and lack of imagination to try exactly the same scam on five different people (and there may have been more) in one relatively small bar in the space of an hour, without even varying on the absurd fruit-salad, shows that the bar had very little to fear from the police.

So, be warned! Next time you’re in Shanghai and are confronted with an unexpected fruit-salad, send it back!

Jasperxx

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