Day One: April 22nd -23rd part trois

In Wuxi:
We got off the train and headed out into the train station. Beggars everywhere. The nice part is I legitimately did not have cash, so all I could say was "Mayo". They took it pretty well, I was warned beggars would be pushier. They probably smelled the poverty on me. All I had was a Canadian fiver, and change left over from my last Tim Hortons run in Canada.

As we approached the exit of the station, a lady approached me and said "Taxi?" showing a key to me. I was almost ready to go with her, but Jessica said "No, licensed taxis only!". The lady was just an average person looking to rip off foreigners by overcharging a ride to a hotel. These people essentially pick up clueless passengers, and drive them to a specific location (NOT determined by the passengers), and try to check them into a hotel without their knowledge, and overcharging the whole way through. The bad thing about being white in China is you make an easy target. The nice thing about being white is you can walk away from them rudely, because you don't speak the language, so there's no point in being polite and trying to tell them no. You just pretend you don't understand.

So we caught two REAL taxis, and made it to Baoli (a mall in Wuxi). We met Jessica's friend Sabrina at Starbucks (the only place in town with real, decent coffee), who was supposed to have gotten us a reservation at a hotel. Turns out once we got to the hotel that they weren't certified to take white people. Hotels have to keep a certain standard in order to serve foreigners, and this one didn't meet the government laid out standard, apparently. It looked fine, it was clean, but something about fire bylaws didn't work out for us. So now we had no place to sleep.