D9: Dongxing to Móng Cái

February 12, 2018

This will be the last street lined with Chinese flags for a while. (I wonder if they've always got this many flags or if it's just a New Years' thing)

I feel like this is not the bridge I crossed into Vietnam in 2006. I feel like the bus and truck traffic was crossing at the same bridge as the pedestrians. But this bridge is not a traffic bridge. It's old enough that it clearly used to be a border crossing truck and bus bridge but it just as clearly hasn't been since whenever they decided they wanted the ability for traffic to go both directions at the same time.

Customs and immigration in both directions went quite smoothly. I pulled the "act like you belong and look too important to bother" card and got away with walking my bike past the various x-ray machines for both countries. As in 2006 I have been stamped in as the driver of a car.

The stairs down to the water and the skiffs going back and forth between countries obviously are no longer a "thing"

There was an official money changing kiosk between countries offering VND 310,000 for CNY 100. I decided instead to wait until I got out into Mong Cai where I aimed for a large Agribank sign. They apparently did not have money changing services as one of the desk staff wrote down an address for me to go to. However, while she was doing that, the security guard went and got the local black market money changer and we did the transaction in the middle of the lobby.

She's agreed to give me VND 350,000 per CNY 100 on ten hundred-yuan notes. XE pegs the official rate at something slightly higher than 360,000 but it's a very flexy rate and once you figure in things like currency transaction fees, it's probably pretty darn close. I've got my bike leaning against one hip, my wallet, phone, and passport in my hand. I'm also holding the money of mine I want to change and the money of her's which is part of what I'm getting. This is not the first time I've played this game and I know she's counting wrong.

Eventually, I squat down on the floor of the bank lobby and spread the money out like a medieval trader in a fantasy novel. I count with my fingers 1, 2, 3, 4. And wouldn't you know, she "forgot" two VND 500,000 notes. Particularly since I caught it, I don't even feel cheated. It was more like a perfunctory, "hey you, are you paying attention?" than it was the sort of behavior I got from ob/gyn department at the Dongxing People's Hospital.

Of course, in addition to trying to cheat me out of my money, they were also trying to perform unnecessary surgery on me and repeatedly insulting my intelligence, so really just the fact that the money changer was smiling at me while she tried to shell game me out of a third of what we agreed upon still made the money changer come out ahead on points.

Lacking a mutual language (but being polite) the shopgirls took photos of themselves with my bike but not with me

With the correct amounts of money in my wallet, and my wallet, phone, passport and camera all accounted for, I'm off to my next errand: get a Vietnamese phone number. After up-selling me to 10gb of data instead of 5gb, they also try to oops-sell me on stuff that Google Translate and sign language just weren't enough to manage. (Oops-selling is like up-selling only without actually having the buyer realize they've agreed to the additional items.)

The hospital was a veritable comedy of errors as no one spoke Chinese and no single doctor had enough English to communicate with me beyond three or four words. Conversation took place by committee. I got an ultrasound that confirmed I was still pregnant and then we tried to talk about why I had only taken the first pill in China but not the second. And once they figured out exactly which drug I wanted, they then had to explain to me "we don't do that at this hospital" ... [cue total panic on my part] ... "because in Vietnam, that's over the counter medicine".

After I'd been to the pharmacy, accidentally bought twice as much Misoprostol as I needed (I originally thought they were 100mg pills not 200mg), gotten my bike out of the hospital parking lot, overpaid lot security, and checked in at a nearby hotel, I suddenly realized "I never paid my hospital bill". By that time, however, what all the first hand accounts I've read describe as "worst period cramps ever" had started. If these are the worst period cramps they must bear some relationship to whatever these women's normal period cramps are like and the idea of that horrifies me more than I can put into words. Based on my history of injuries large and small, I would personally describe the sensation as being "worse than having sharp fragments of broken bone sticking out through your skin".

Six hours and four morphine pills later, I was able to think about getting lunch. It would be another three hours, however, before I managed.

Today's ride: 8 km (5 miles)
Total: 294 km (183 miles)

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