WORLD VIEW - China 10/29/2008

"China's curious hotels" by Tim Johnson, McClatchy News

I travel quite a lot in China, so it doesn’t take much to get me talking about hotels here. There are always curious things.

The last two nights are a case in point. Last night, I stayed at a hotel in Yinchuan, capital of the Ningxia Autonomous Region. It’s a city of about a million people, tiny by Chinese standards.

My assistant made the reservation for the hotel. I didn’t recognize the name, something like Die-suh Business Hotel. To my surprise, it turns out to be a Days Inn Hotel, a well-known brand in the U.S.

Nice hotel. Big flat-screen TV. Free broadband internet. A pot to boil water for a morning coffee. But no heat.

When the plane landed at the airport, the announced temperature was 44 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius).

I got under the covers at that hotel last night, and I didn’t budge till the last possible moment this morning. It was freeezzinng. Brrr.

Presumably, the reason is that the government bars most buildings from turning the heat on until Nov. 15. The receptionist at the hotel said that’s when the hotel would heat its rooms.

Tonight, I am in a little city in Inner Mongolia. The hotel is a simple local hotel. But what happened is rather extraordinary, astounding really, given what would likely happen in my home country. Despite years of experience, I still have occasional glitches in my knowledge of my laptop. For some reason, I couldn’t get it to connect to the internet. Within a few minutes, a woman was up with the correct DNS numbers for the local server. Still no luck.

Within an hour, a crew of technicians was in my room tinkering with the network program on my laptop. They were working in a language foreign to them (English) and doing so with good humor. Soon, they set up a new connection for me.

Can you imagine calling for help with a laptop in most foreign countries? They would scoff. So here I sit, sipping a local Chunshengtai Beer (I kid you not) and surfing the internet from Wuda, Inner Mongolia. And the heat is on!