Scammahs

After a stop for coffee, we headed to the Shanghai Museum in People’s Park where admission is now free until the end of the Olympics. Matt was stopped by three young Chinese kids to take a picture and we struck up a conversation about the famous Shanghai acrobats. They were only in town for the day and really wanted to check out the show. They told us the museum line was an hour and half long and asked us if we wanted to join them for the show instead. We thought, why not? Our other plan for the day was to see the multimedia/million dollar Shanghai Circus World Show that evening. They were very sweet kids and their English was amazingly good. We had the opportunity to ask all sorts of China related questions. They told us when they tried to call the box office for tickets, that they had sold out but that they knew of other reputable places to buy tickets like hotels, restaurants and tea houses. They lead us to a tea house several blocks away where we sat down and talked about the show and the girls at the tea house brought over some rather official looking tickets without seat assignments. Now, we are a little naïve sometimes, but I was starting to get a little suspicious of this little trio, which was REALLY hard because they were so friendly and I didn’t want them to feel bad. Anyways, they bought some tickets for 200 yuan each and they tried to get us to buy the 280 yuan tickets—for honeymoon they said. I told them we went camping for our honeymoon and they just thought that was hen youyisi or very interesting. In the end, we told them we were still waiting for Matt’s paycheck and that we didn’t have enough to buy the tickets now, but maybe another day. Meanwhile, they walked us out and continued the charade of being out-of-towners like us. We even had a quick Chinese lesson on the difference between a fang guan vs a fang dian, one of which you can eat and live in, and the other only eat in.

Now to premise this little story, Matt has been approached twice already on his own by two different groups of three really friendly people who speak English and have tried to get him to come to that same mall with the teahouse we went to yesterday. He was taken in once already and sampled a few cups of some nice tea which cost him about 30$. Of course the whole time, he had great conversation, learned a bunch about Shanghai and about tea but is wary of those Kids in People’s Park. The funny thing is that although Matt kinda knew the story, he still let them lead us on for a while just so that I could experience the whole scam. What a guy! What’s even funnier is that our host Nelson today brought a newspaper article that explains exactly this trend of scammers in People’s park where they take expats for 200-3000 yuan or 30-400 or so dollars.

I actually still feel a little bad about not buying those tickets if only because these guys really did a great job of acting the part. I believed or wanted to believe that they had just graduated from college and one of them was teaching history in a highschool in Suzhou. I wanted to believe that they were excited to see the acrobatic show. They had all the angles covered and they only thing that really gave it away for me was the tea house girl with her tickets and her smirk. I could just feel her trying not to laugh. Who knows what their cut was, it probably wasn’t going to be much. They were such nice people, it really was a pity we couldn’t hangout under other circumstances. I still hope the best for them, even if that means they scam some other westerner to give them money for possibly fake tickets.