There’s an App for That
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re still in Shanghai; last weekend we rode the MagLev train to the airport just for fun. The speed topped out at 186 miles an hour. I felt a little like I was on a ride at Disney World. Lee recently heard someone say that Shanghai is like living ten years in the future, at prices from ten years in the past. I can’t argue with that.
There’s an App for That
The taxi driver tapped Lee on the shoulder, and jabbered in rapid-fire Mandarin. He had chased us down a dark, wet alley, into the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express.
We’d already spent more than six or eight minutes sitting in his car in the bus lane, trying to figure out how to pay for our ride from the Xian airport. He kept talking and talking, pointing at Lee’s phone, at his ear, at Lee—it was like a very loud, frustrated game of charades. We absolutely couldn’t figure out what the problem was. We’d downloaded the apps—Alipay and WeChat—well in advance. We’d both gone through the technological contortions required to get our foreign credit cards attached and verified. Now we were trying to pay with a QR code, which is how things are done in China, and it wasn’t going well.
Eventually Lee figured out that he needed to enter his pin code. It’s a good thing he remembered his PIN code; I was busy trying to figure out how to check us into the hotel (using the app, of course).
Life in China happens on these two mobile apps: Alipay and WeChat. You read the restaurant menu on the app. You order your meal on the app. You pay for your meal on the app. You pay for taxis, transit, groceries, flu shots, new shoes, museum tickets—on the app. You buy the tickets on the app (in what’s called a mini-app—a distinct app within the Alipay or WeChat apps).
For the first week that we were here, I kept trying to scan the menu QR codes with my iPhone’s camera. Oh right, that’s not how it works here. You have to use the app.
I’m never quite sure which app is expected for a given use-case, so now I just open my QR code on Alipay and hold it up. Eventually someone will scan my phone if they want me to pay. A couple of days after we arrived, in a tiny Xian bakery, I held up my QR code, and the server held up hers, and it was like we were in a QR code face-off. I had no idea what to do. People were jammed against my back, snaking their arms in front of me, holding out their phones to pay, trying to get around this incompetent foreigner who was mucking up the system. Finally the server took my phone out of my hand and showed me where my ‘scan’ button is. It’s a good thing she did—it was the opposite of what I’d been doing up to that point. I’m used to both processes now, though—one of the restaurants we keep revisiting here in Shanghai requires me to scan their code, because for some reason they can’t accept a QR code linked to a foreign credit card.
Nobody uses cash. We knew that, from our last visit in 2018. Nobody uses credit cards, either. On that trip, we’d attempt to pay with our card, and cashiers would have to find a credit card machine, plug it in, figure out how to work it, study our card, and wave it in the general direction of the machine, unsure how the process even worked. Back then, foreigners couldn’t really use the apps, so every time I had to pay for anything, I held my breath for a second and hoped we could make a card work.
I could go on about more apps—about how the ones we usually rely on don’t work very well here, like Google Maps, or TripAdvisor. Or about how I have to remember to turn on my VPN every time I get on the wifi in our hotel. I could tell you that I’ve developed a rudimentary familiarity with DianPing, the restaurant review app (at least I think that’s what it’s called—the name is in Mandarin). Of course I could point out that with any of the apps, the first thing one has to do is figure out how to make it translate to English, which took me a solid week.
But the fact that we can even use the apps on this visit, as opposed to how things were in 2018, is so remarkable that I’m not going to complain. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure how we’d function without them. I am slowly, slowly getting the hang of it. It took me about an hour to buy our tickets to see the Terracotta Warriors; I’m hoping I can get that down to thirty minutes when I buy our tickets to see the giant pandas.
Master of the universe FTW!
Take care,
Lisa
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