It turns out, it’s possible to spend weeks watching CNN and nothing happens except the dollar plays Limbo and a bunch of old white men make up increasingly dire theories regarding the mortgage crisis. Then the moment the cable dies, Benazir Bhutto goes and gets herself blown up shot pummelled with shrapnel hit on the head killed. Damn! Sometimes life is so unfair, but one thing’s for sure, it’s time to renew the cable subscription.
So after five days, of no CNN (or HBO or Star Movies or National Geographic Channel), Christian and I finally went to some big bureaucratic building downtown to renew our cable subscription. It should have been easy enough. Theoretically, all you have to do is pay someone some money, after all, right? Christian figured we could squeeze the errand in right before my thirty-week doctor’s appointment.
Only the thing is, when we arrived and waved the cable subscription card around, no one had any clue what we wanted. And of course, no one spoke English even though theoretically these people handle something related to foreigners. Oh, and did I mention that I was already stressed out because it was snowing so we, like, totally almost died on the car ride to downtown? At least it seemed that way in my hormone-addled head.
Anyway, there we were, standing in front of this desk as some woman was shooting questions at me in the most complicated Chinese technical jargon she could muster. Christian, meanwhile, was relaying instructions of what I should say to these people, filled with words like “renew” and “subscription,” none of which fall into my vocabulary which is about the equivalent to that of a very stupid seven year old who spends too much time at the hospital. And because the situation wasn’t uncomfortable enough, the Kungfu Master in my nether-regions was busy using my lungs for martial arts practice. It was precisely the kind of situation, I’m sure, that inspires seven-month-pregnant women not to ever leave the house. As it was I almost burst into tears in the middle of that Chinese government office.
Almost.
With my last ounce of sanity I managed to pull out the Chinese for: “Last week, we watched TV. This week, we don’t watch TV. We want to watch TV.”
Suddenly, everyone on the Chinese side seemed to understand what we wanted. They filled out applications, sent us to get Christian’s passport and visa photocopied, refused to take our money, and told us to take some form back to Christian’s company to get it signed before we would be able to pay money. All while telling me to my face that my Chinese was wonderful, and to everyone else in the vicinity that I’m a complete idiot (look, if my language skills are good enough to understand complements, they’re probably good enough to understand criticisms as well).
After all that, it turned out that we weren’t even in the right building. We went to the application building, not the “pay your money” building which is in an entirely different part of town. Yet it never occurred to anyone, despite my comments of, “We have TV. We want to give you money,” that maybe, just maybe we weren’t there to apply for an entirely new card.
Christian, in all probability, is going to have to invest in some heavy drugs in order to get a repeat performance out of me this weekend, especially as the cable renewal errand was followed up by one of the world’s most frustrating doctor’s appointments. My quota for humiliating circumstances has been more than filled.