



I arrived at my hotel room in Xiamen, China, in the dead of night, tired and thirsty after a long day, to find a room full of tea, but no water. I took the lift down to the hotel entrance and went to the counter to ask the receptionist for a bottle.





The meek yet pretty receptionist answered me in softly spoken Chinese.





We stared at each other for a moment like two lost souls, and I repeated,





‘Water?’





She looked around nervously, as I imagine a bank clerk might if he had just been faced by a masked lunatic with a shotgun.





I decided to break into a full charades demonstration, using my years of family Christmas experience. I even cheated a little as I held an imaginary bottle to my open mouth, gurgling:





‘Gagagarr, water!’





Then I screwed the imaginary lid back on my imaginary bottle.





‘No smoking inlis!’ she answered,

her panic driving her to

combine every word of English she knew in one momentous sentence.





I repeated the charade with renewed enthusiasm.





‘Graagragraa, yummm water water drinky drinky water,’ rubbing my stomach, and pouring my imaginary water all over my face and hair, feeling like an actor from a low budget shampoo commercial.





She wrote down a number on a piece of paper and pointed at the phone.





I returned to my room and dialled the number she had given me. Another softly spoken male voice answered in Chinese.





'Water? Can I have some Water? There is no water in my room,' I said, knowing that I was at a clear disadvantage, unable to perform my Oscar winning charade performance over the phone.





Eventually after a long ‘aaaahh’ he answered ‘no’ and we both hung up the phone, none the wiser.





By now I really wanted some water, so I called a friend living in Spain who speaks Chinese from my mobile phone and asked them to call the hotel to ask them to bring water to my room.