Last year there were a few times that Sean and I wished we had a Chinese credit card to pay for things online (mainly flights). Our university gives us each a bank account and a debit card, but you can't use the debit card on the internet or over the phone.

Last week, Sean and I decided to plan a trip to South Korea during a week when our students have some "practical training" instead of our classes. Combining the weekends and some days off we can travel for about 10 days. To buy tickets we have a few options: find a travel agent that speaks English and pay in cash or use one of our American credit cards to buy the flight on elong.com (Chinese expedia). Since I don't really have a way to pay off my credit cards easily from China, we would rather just use the money that we earn here. I called the internet company and they said that we could go to our bank and they could do a money transfer.

So today Sean and I walked to the bank and asked if they could do a transfer for us. At first they said no, not surprisingly. We asked if they could sign us up for internet banking so that we could do transfers by ourselves and they said no because it would be too "complex" for us. This is something about how Chinese businesses work that is continually frustrating for me. It seems like the rules can always change or more accurately, sometimes it seems like there are no rules. Not wanting to give up so easily we persisted and insisted that we could, in fact, handle internet banking.

The manager finally relented and they quickly and relatively easily signed us up for internet banking. After the process was done the manager said that she would also do the transfer for us but "just this once" and all for about the cost of a dollar. Sean and I were pretty happy that we were able to book tickets and then transfer money all without the help of a student or friend. Sure, the bank "lobby assistant" could speak fairly good English and I had to call the English helpline at elong, but even so the whole excursion still probably took about 2 hours. Even managing the little tasks in a foreign country seem like a big accomplishment when you can do it on your own.

Two things that I thought about during this adventure:
1) Sometimes I think Chinese businesses just say no to any services to foreigners because we can be a complicated pain and hassle to deal with
2) I wish I would have bugged my manager more last year about internet banking and money transfers because now Sean and I can do everything on our own

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