Dodgy Massage
At the end of the day, we had played with pandas and experienced some stressful (although ultimately fantastic) meals, and we were ready for a little relaxation. Our hotel featured a spa, so we wandered up to inquire about getting massages.

The young guy who greeted us at the spa jumped up from his TV show and tried his best to understand my pathetic Mandarin. He led us down a long hallway and opened the door to a huge room filled with deluxe foot-massage chairs, all facing a big-screen TV. The chairs were empty except for three hotel staff members, who were lounging in the front row, watching a Chinese sit-com. They shouted something to our guy, who promptly ushered us out and shut the door. Then an older lady caught up with us and led us out of the spa and down a corridor to a regular hotel room. She unlocked it and gestured for us to enter. We felt a little uncomfortable, so I asked whether we could just do the massages in our own room. The older lady and the young guy (her son?) acted like that was a brilliant idea. So we all marched down the hall to our room. Cath and I stood by while they pulled back our bed covers and otherwise prepared for the massages. We conferred, agreed it was a bit dodgy, and told the lady and boy that we really just wanted foot massages and why couldn’t we do that in the regular massage chairs at the freakin’ spa? So we all headed back to the spa, skipped right past the fancy massage room, saw through half-closed doors that most of the hotel staff members were watching TV in the massage rooms, and finally ended up in a grungy room with four battered recliners, a crooked painting of a naked lady, a plastic wall clock hung way too high and stuck at 2:00, and a wide-open window beckoning all the mosquitoes to come in for a snack.

Cath sat in the recliner by the window, and I sat in the chair next to her. The room soon filled with every variety of flying insect in China, and I discovered that moths are almost, but not quite, as horrifying to Cath as roaches are. The lady massaged my feet, and she did a good job. But I was so freaked out by all the mosquitoes that I used all her towels to cover my legs. Alas, I still got three bites. Not very relaxing.

The boy did Cath’s foot massage, and he was both excruciatingly frustrating and hilarious. From our vantage point by the window, we could see another wing of the hotel, where apparently the staff lived and, at that moment, partied. He clearly wanted to be with them WAY more than he wanted to earn a good tip from us. So he would half-heartedly massage Cath’s leg while he hung most of his body out the window to catch a glimpse of the action. Sometimes he would use his free hand to send text messages. Once he checked his phone and then ran out of the room for several minutes to make a call.

Sometimes experiences such as this make you want to run screaming into the streets. But, as Cath always says, “It’s all part of the adventure.”