Guest Blog by Oli Benet: Little Trouble in Big China

Picture from Translationblog.co.uk

I arrived at my hotel room in Xiamen, China, in the dead of night, tired and thirsty after a long day, to find a room full of tea, but no water. I took the lift down to the hotel entrance and went to the counter to ask the receptionist for a bottle. 

The meek yet pretty receptionist answered me in softly spoken Chinese. 

We stared at each other for a moment like two lost souls, and I repeated, 

‘Water?’

She looked around nervously, as I imagine a bank clerk might if he had just been faced by a masked lunatic with a shotgun. 

I decided to break into a full charades demonstration, using my years of family Christmas experience. I even cheated a little as I held an imaginary bottle to my open mouth, gurgling: 

‘Gagagarr, water!’

Then I screwed the imaginary lid back on my imaginary bottle.

‘No smoking inlis!’ she answered, her panic driving her to combine every word of English she knew in one momentous sentence.

I repeated the charade with renewed enthusiasm.

‘Graagragraa, yummm water water drinky drinky water,’ rubbing my stomach, and pouring my imaginary water all over my face and hair, feeling like an actor from a low budget shampoo commercial. 

She wrote down a number on a piece of paper and pointed at the phone. 

I returned to my room and dialled the number she had given me. Another softly spoken male voice answered in Chinese.

'Water? Can I have some Water? There is no water in my room,' I said, knowing that I was at a clear disadvantage, unable to perform my Oscar winning charade performance over the phone. 

Eventually after a long ‘aaaahh’ he answered ‘no’ and we both hung up the phone, none the wiser. 

By now I really wanted some water, so I called a friend living in Spain who speaks Chinese from my mobile phone and asked them to call the hotel to ask them to bring water to my room.

A few minutes later there was a knock at the door and I was presented with 2 bottles of water. Feeling confident now, I showed the man a photo of a can of beer in a magazine. He nodded his head and disappeared down the corridor, only to return later with a can of beer.

‘Yuan?’ he said

‘You what?’ 

‘Yuan?’

‘...er I did, but you didn't understand me...’

‘Yuan?’

‘Oh! Can you charge the room? I have no cash...’

I may as well have read him an extract from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. An uncomfortable silence ensued. 

‘Here, you can have the beer back!’ I said, not knowing what else to do.  

He refused, clearly thinking I was inviting him to share the beer with me. Instead he walked into my room, dialled for reception and passed me the phone.

‘She doesn't understand me!’ I said, trying to pass the phone back.

He wouldn't take it, so I went through the motions.

‘Hello, can you charge a beer to my room,’ I said to the nervous receptionist. 

There was a long pause. 

‘........water?’ she said.

I tried to pass the phone and the beer back to the man, but he wouldn't take them. He pushed the phone into my hand while we stood together wedged between 2 beds trying not to make eye contact.

I could feel the receptionists' alarm through the handset.

I really didn't want this beer any more...

It was a moment of pure gridlock. There was growing panic on both our faces as we spluttered broken words that neither of us understood. I couldn't see how it would end.

Finally the man took the phone, mumbled into it for a while, then walked out of the room.

Yuan, you ask? 

No, I'm pretty sure I lost.

Volcano Strikes Back

-->I’m going to visit my brother in Barcelona.

I haven’t seen him since Christmas.

It’s the last time I’m going to see him before heading off to Colombia for a few months to meet my future in-laws. What a blog that’ll be!

I’m also off to write a novel.

But before all that, it’s really important I see my brother.

I can’t go away unless I see him.

I pack my suitcase, leave work early and get the train at London Bridge station.

My phone rings before the train doors shut.

“It’s cancelled,” Mum says.

The Volcano has struck again.

I’m in tears. The three day window of opportunity I had to see my brother is closing.

I transfer my flight to the following morning and pray the ashy farts will stop (the volcano’s not mine).

Mum drives me to the airport at 4am.

I hate airport procedure and even more at that time in the morning.

No, I won’t be putting my mascara in a little clear plastic bag.

I never do and no one ever says anything when it goes through the X-ray.

I overhear the security staff complaining to each other about a passenger’s response to their questions:

“Do you have paste? ... No, only toothpaste. Do you have gel? .... No, only hair gel.”

I sympathise because I’m an airport know-it-all.

Why is everyone so frantic anyway?

It’s not even 5am and passengers are having cooked breakfasts washed down with pints of beer, as if it was their last supper.

It will be if their cholesterol has anything to do with it.

Usually I shun the queue to the plane until the last minute but this time I join it.

Behind me I listen to a couple getting anxious because they can’t find their seat numbers on their easyjet boarding pass.

Really? I think.

Do people still not know easyjet don’t have seat numbers?

Their panic is contagious and finally I turn around and tell them to stop looking for because there aren’t any.

“Oh,” the woman smiles with relief. “We’ve never flown on easyjet before, have we?”

“Not had that luxury,” her partner adds.

Perhaps they’ve only been on Ryanair. I think you have to bring your own seats with that lot.

Soon they’ll dole out aeroplane kits where you have to make your own plane. You’ll have to pay extra if you use sellotape.

I have a coffee and get chatting to the lady in the seat next to me.

Our friendly chat culminates in an offer of a mint. This is the pinnacle of plane friendship.

I start to feel excited.

It’s miraculous, in a few hours I’ll see my brother.

No volcano can stop me now.

Picture by www.olibenet.com

GUEST BLOGGER: My brother, the Original Shop Boy

When I was a kid people would tell me about how cool their cat was, what tricks their dog could do and how well spoken their parrot was. I had snails and lizards and stick insects. The only trick my lizards could do was lose their tail when stressed, a habit I’m glad I never picked up, my snails ate lettuce and my stick insects were brown and sticky.

I hatched the stick insect eggs next to the hot water tank in the house, but never remembered having left them there, and therefore an army of minute stick insects would guard the warm towels, night and day, before dying of boredom or starvation, whichever came first.

Now lizards don’t come for free in London, as many of you might know. London and Mexico differ in many ways, the most distinctive difference between the two countries being a lack of wild lizards in London, and the fact that Argos UK doesn’t accept Pesos.

All residents of London city have to work for their lizards, and I was no exception. I was the original shop boy. While my sister worked for point horror books and Unibrow Monthly Magazine subscriptions, I enthusiastically put lamps together, knowing that after a month of screwing light arms (not as much fun as it sounds, it’s the bit that sticks out from the middle of the light and holds a bulb), my father would drive me to Hackney to choose a lizard.

What attracted me to Lizards? Everyone knows dogs can’t stand halogen bulbs, but lizards love them. I linked my animal passions to my job, clearly showing my genius at a young age. If I had been running a bone shop, I’m sure I would have bought a dog. However I know dogs are expensive and I would have had to screw hundreds of bones together, I don’t know if I would have had the patience. Food for thought, I’m sure you’ll all agree.

Did my work justify a lizard you ask? Let me give you an insight. To wire a light fitting from scratch , you must first grapple with “The Chain”, the most important tool in the shop. To get cables through the fitting’s arm, you need to tie the cables onto a chain you then dangle it through the arm hole (read that carefully, if you are reading this out loud), until you are able to pull the chain through(followed by the cables) to the other end of the arm. A major part of this operation involved cables jammed somewhere in the light, “The Chain” broken in pieces inside the arm, and tears of frustration rolling down your cheek. No one could deny that this was undoubtedly worthy of a small to medium sized lizard.

At the time, I believed “The Chain” to be a professional tool designed for light construction workers worldwide, and, like me, they were all in their shops swinging light arms over their heads in frustration by their chain in attempts to dislodge it and buy a lizard.

Now, 15 years later, I realize it was the chain used to pull a plug out of our bath. I realize emptying a bath was difficult as a child because the chain was being used to pull cables through an arm in our little light shop. Still, if it meant I could have a lizard, I would wrestle with a plug any day of the week.


NB Find out more about Oriol 'Oli' Benet, a DJ and freestyle rollerblader here and here