My passport was in that backpack. Actually it might still be as far as I know, because who whould ever need my Swedish passport, excepting me of course?
We looked around everywhere we could think and asked bartenders in bouth Paname and the bar next doors but was met with nothing but indifference. We soon headed back to Tiffany's home far in the South of the city. I immediately called home for some assistant and after mom had contacted the Swedish foreign minestry I managed to calm down and get some sleep. From that point on and through the next 48 hours the only thing that was going through my mind was "it is only monetary".
In the morning I called the Swedish embassy of China's emergency hotline and got the advice to file police reports and make sure I got an official report which I could bring to either the Swedish embassy in Beijing or the Swedish consulate in Shanghai. I went out to meet my friend, Li Min (to whom I was supposed to give about fifteen hundred Swedish kronor/Hong Kong dollar/Chinese yuan worth of eye creams that was in the bag), and together we went back to Paname where we once again looked around, tried to talk to the staff of the bar and called the police.
The police here was actually very helpful and with Li Min's assistance I soon had a written report to take to the something something ministry of something something in Chengdu (I can't even remember what it was called to be honest). There we encountered our first major problem; it was already near 5pm when everything in China would close and remain such for the following four days, I basically had 15 minutes to finish everything or I would be a sitting duck in Chengdu for until the end of the holidays. And this is where the woman told me I need to go to my friend's home, find the closest police station and register there as I was staying in a local home and everybody visiting China must register where they stay within 24 hours. Now the problem of course was that she lives over an hour from where we were to her home, and even then we had no idea where the police station would be, and even if we did know that it would take slightly more than 10 minutes to finish that registration. This is not even counting that I had only been in Chengdu for about 17 hours, apparently that didn't actually matter, everything else had to be done by the book though.
She was not completely impossible though, actually she was fairly nice when it all came down to it; she suggested I check in to a nearby hotel immediately and she was willing to stay for another 30 minutes to help me out. So Li Min and I ran off to a hotel, that turned out to be outside the window of my old flat in Chengdu, checked me in and ran back to get the police report.
Calmed down now that we had done everything we could I went for clothes shopping, took a much needed shower and headed towards another night of wicked adventures with Paul, Tiffany and others.
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