u/pawnografik

My wife went to book us a rental car for our French holiday on booking.com today.

She has both a Finnish driving license and a Chinese driving licence.

Initially the car (a Nissan juke) was priced at €66 and she accepted that and started to proceed with the booking. At the point where it asks for your license details she changed it to be her Finnish license - figuring that when in Europe it would be best to use her European license. Goes to check out and noticed the price had changed. Significantly. The new price was €133 a day!

She figured it was one of those last minute deals and she had missed out by taking too long to finish the booking so she went back and tried with a different car. Same thing happened.

Eventually found the price basically doubled when she switched from her Chinese license to her Finnish one.

This is outrageous discrimination! How is it even legal?

I was in a didi over the weekend. The shifu had some music playing.

It was just a drum beat with a backing track. But not dance speed - more like a marching speed kind of beat. But it wasn’t a military match. Just one drummer (probably electronic). No words for the whole track., but it did have an ambient backing. But the focus was definitely the drumming. The track was about as long as a normal song (approx 4 mins). The beat was extremely catchy.

After the drum solo ‘song’ he played another song by (I think) the same artist- it also had this slower paced drum beat. But this track had the hit singing. In Chinese.

I think this was modern popular music, not a back in the day military tune.

I’m after the drum track. Any ideas?

So something pretty full on happened to me a while back. We had a long weekend so we escaped to the seaside at Qinghuandao to get away from the pollution for a bit. I thought I’d do my cold water swimming thing and go for an early morning swim about 830 in the morning. So I met my wife on the beach after her run and I’m there on the shore taking off my shoes and plucking up my courage, when I notice a woman about 50-100 m away walk into the sea, still wearing her shoes and socks. She stepped in, looked down at her feet, then looked out to sea for a bit, then took another couple of steps in deeper. Water is now up to about her knee level.

She was fully clothed, and wearing a leisure tracksuit, sneakers, and a winter puffer jacket.

So I’m watching her thinking “this is definitely a bit off, something is not right“.

She then turned around and comes back to the beach. This made me feel a bit relieved. However, she then takes off her puffer jacket, drops it on the sand, and marches towards the sea with a new sense of purpose…

“Whoops“ think I. “This is it, she’s going in!“

So I quickly finished taking off my gear and ran in after her. I got to her when she was still sort of thigh deep and gently guided her back to shore.

She was very young. Maybe 15. A bit chubby. Very, very miserable. Emotionally distraught.

I sat her down, and retrieved her puffer jacket to put around her shoulders. She had stopped crying, but it was clear she had been crying a lot immediately before. I think the distraction of having a foreigner was probably helpful, but there wasn’t much I could really do, as the language barrier stopped me offering any kind of consolation or real aid. As such, I waved over a few Chinese people and soon a crowd gathered and everyone was vigourously chattering away in mandarin.

I hung around on the edge of the crowd for a little bit, but I was getting cold and I still hadn’t had my swim. So I made a few enquiring noises and one old guy who seemed to know what was what gave me two thumbs up and tried to congratulate me in Chinglish. I think he also said something about her mother being on the way or not far away or something.

Then we left the scene.

The water was very cold and her being fully clothed and not physically fit she wouldn’t have lasted long - especially if she didn’t really want to last.

I’ve been thinking about her today due to another Reddit post. I guess I’ll never know the back story. I don’t know if it was a genuine suicide attempt or a cry for attention and I’m not sure she knew either. Either way, I’m glad I was there when I was, and acted when I did.