Shanghaied

So then we checked out of our DEET scented hotel and took an unregistered taxi to Shanghai, which was where we started to get into trouble.
Shanghai is a big bustling city where everyone is sure you're trying to rip them off, so just to be on the safe side, they pull a preemptive one over on you.
The initial plan was to split two rooms between the five of us and squeeze an extra cot into one. Well, turns out an extra cot costs the equivalent of $50, half the price of a $100 a night room... which fits two people. Also the guy on the cot doesn't get free breakfast. Which costs $30. This is THE Jinjiang hotel, you know.
So, as this is getting sorted out, Ping, Alex the videography wiz, and myself go over to the Bank of China to exchange some of these fat stacks of cash we've brought over from the U.S. I hand my moneys over to the teller who proceeds to give me a very hairy eyeball before giving a harrier eyeball to my bills. I wish I could have had a picture of the way this guy was looking at the bills, because it certainly wasn't the way most people look at bills to see if they're fake or not. You'd expect that he might, you know, check for watermarks, hold the bill up to the light to see if the little strip thing was in them. Nope. None of that. The way they check bills at the Bank of China is they put them down on the table and get their face right up next to the bill and give it a mean long look. Then they hand it over to another guy who does the exact same thing. Then there's a third guy, too. Once they decide the first bill is OK, they take a look at the second bill, but they compare it to the first bill, giving each bill the hairy eyeball all over again, before passing it off to the next guy, etc. etch. Then the third bill, they'll wanna compare to both of the first two.
This took two hours.
At the end of the two hours, after all that work, they had to have something to show for it all, and what they decide that was going to be was that three of the hundred dollar bills I'd handed them were fake. I was like, what? I got those from the bank! (Well, actually Ping got them from the bank. We'd divided up the cash to exchange so it would take less time comparing.) They can't be fake.
And they were like, see, these bills look a little darker than the other ones. No mention of watermarks, or stringy things. Just that they thought they looked a little darker.
I said, well then give them back to me.
And they said, no it would be illegal for us to give them back to you.
And I said, what? You could just be claiming all my cash was fake and take it all away from me, that's not fair!
Finally, they put the bills in an envelope and gave me a form to fill out, which would require them to send the bills to someone who knew what they were doing and they'd decide if they were really fake after all. We're still waiting on that.
And since I put up so much of a fuss, they called the police and had me arrested!
Well, they finally got me down to the police station, which took a while because I wanted Ping to come with me to speak Chinese, and Ping had to go back and deal with the hotel situation first, so everyone else who had been waiting in the lobby for two hours could go up to their rooms.
And when they got me to the police station, the police chief asked us what happened, and we all gave it to him straight, and he gave us the verdict, which was that the bank manager was wasting everybody's time, and we should all go home.
Then we went home, and had a delightful dinner with Ping's family. I was so tired after all the boating and all the getting arrested, I kept falling asleep at the table in the middle of doing things like chewing, and talking, so I left early.