Cash and Travel

I saw this announcement a few days ago:

The CCAA has sent a notice to all agencies that they are increasing the $3000 orphanage donation. This is referred to as a "donation" but it is actually a required fee paid by all adoptive families. It is now being set at 35,000 RMB which at the current exchange rate (6.8812 to 1) is approximately $5086. This increase is required of all families traveling after January 1, 2009 and must be paid in RMB not dollars.

This is a fee that all adoptive families must hand carry, in crisp, new $100 bills, to China. Since many of the other fees are also paid in cash, the amount of cash carried to China adds up to many thousands of dollars. While the major hotels will accept credit cards, it appears that many transactions are still done in cold hard cash.

So I flew to China with a stack of $100 bills hidden under my clothing, feeling like a walking ATM machine. Traveling after January 1 will make that stack 20 bills larger.

China is actually quite safe for foreigners, and we never really felt threatened while we were there. We could walk around the streets by ourselves and even though we were very obviously foreigners, we really didn't have to worry about crime. The one problem that does exist pretty widely is pick pocketing. I read several accounts of people getting pick pocketed right outside the Bell Tower Hotel in Xi'an, where we stayed. When we were in Detroit on the way home, we ran into another family coming back from China. They lost $2100 in Guangzhou to a pick pocket who used a cigarette burn as a distraction.

So we were pretty vigilant about how we handled the cash, and kept most of it in the hotel safe when we were able.

I also really didn't understand why they required NEW $100 bills. It seemed to me that used bills were just as legal tender. And some of the Chinese money we received when we exchanged these new $100 bills looked like tattered rags.

I know now. Counterfeiting is also a problem in China. So when exchanging money at a bank, all the bills are run through a universally finicky scanner, which seems to reject about half of the bills. It was not uncommon for me to carry some money into a bank and then sit there for a half hour or more while the teller ran several of the bills through the scanner again and again and again. Then they would hold them up to the light and examine them. Then they would get the manager who would run them through the scanner 10 more times, bending the bill, snapping it between their fingers, or waving it in the air between each pass. On a couple occasions, the manager finally signed off everything just to get things moving again.

So money was always a concern. Especially since the financial "burn rate" was so high. Looking at the dwindling pile of bills in the hotel safe, I felt like a personal economic stimulus package. I bailed out the airlines, the railroad, several taxis, the orphanage, way too many government agencies, several hotels, numerous restaurants, a bunch of street vendors, and even a rickshaw driver. I figured the economy would collapse immediately after I left. Several times Deb asked me if the money was going to last longer than the trip or if the trip was going to last longer than the money. I assured her of the former.

We did make it with some to spare. We did not get pick pocketed. Everything worked out. God is good.