Cambodia, China, and the Will of God

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29 March 2010:

You remember how I said I wasn't sure I wanted to go to China at all? My mother said to ask God for a sign. Although I frequently doubt the power (or for that matter, the existence) of such things, I prayed very earnestly and intensely, and did in fact receive a sign. I did! I will always continue to doubt such things, but for the record, I did in fact receive a sign. Which I then chose to disregard.

I was up late one day about a week before I needed to depart to China. I decided it was well time to buy my plane ticket to Jinan, and so I did. Or tried to. The faithful credit card I have used without fail for the last eight years was somehow rejected by China Southern's International website. Multiple times. My faithful debit card, which has supported me in many a dark time, was also rejected. Multiple times. There is only one flight you can buy from Phnom Penh to Jinan--and this was via China Southern.

I called customer service. It was inaccessible from my phone. It was inaccessible from our manager Trea's phone. It was inaccessible from LanguageCorps' Skype account.

I wrote to the customer service email. Forty-eight hours later, I got an email back saying, Please forward your transaction number and credit card number. Then we can process your request. Well, okay. If that was what they needed. Twenty-four MORE hours later I got a response to my response: Please send a color scan of both sides of your credit card. THEN we can process your request. Okay, what shysty bureaucracy is this?

I gave up on the email. Let me tell you something I have learned about buying airline tickets online. The air ticket websites run according to the laws of supply and demand. The higher the demand, the higher the price. Consequently, the more you look around, speculate on prices, and run the same search on the same destination on the same date, the more expensive that fare becomes. It also affects the fares on the surrounding dates. By the time I re-searched the fare from Phnom Penh to Jinan, my repeated attempts at purchasing had inflated it so much that it cost nearly seven hundred dollars (as opposed to the original $280).

It looked like I really might be living in Cambodia indefinitely. After all, God had spoken. Who was I to disobey?

Then Trea got the idea that we should go to a travel agency, and they managed to book me a ticket for the next Sunday morning for only about $400. More than I intended to spend, but much better than fighting with China Southern over a $700 ticket.

And so here I am, in China, perhaps disobeying the Will of God. We'll see where it gets me.

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