Money

In Beijing, I usually pay with cash. Credit cards aren't widely used, although a lot of nicer restaurants, department stores and grocery stores accept them.  I recently got a local Chinese debit card that can be used in places that a Mastercard or Visa can not.

When you pay with cash, in particular the larger bills like 50 or 100 RMB (=6/12 USD), people either look closely at the bill, or run it through a machine to check that it is authentic. I never really thought much about it, but then last week, I went to a restaurant with my colleagues and paid the bill with a 50 RMB note. The waitress returned a bit later, and said sorry, this isn't real. Then we all sat around and tried to figure out why it wasn't real (it was difficult).

For this bill, there were two problems. The first was that the silver strip woven vertically into the note was actually printed on. This goes through the 0 of the large 50. The second was that if you crinkled the note, it made more noise than a real note.