Shenzhen,
China
Monday, February 4, 2008
If you are in a hurry, don't go to a bank in Shenzhen any time before the Chinese Spring Festival. You will be waiting for a long time! At the best of times, China is a cash society, albeit one which is seeing a rapidly increasing popularity of credit cards. The thing is that come the national holiday, huge numbers of people head home from Guangdong's cities to their rural homes where credit cards and debit cards are about as useful as a bar of soap in a desert. Cash rules, and as a result people quite literally withdraw piles of cash from the bank to take home with them.
So, as I'm not a mugger waiting to steal a few cash laden bags, all I could do was wait, and wait, and....wait.
