Word: roderick
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...rooms, most with bath, for the equivalent of $5 a day. while Shanghai's Hoping (Peace) Hotel charges roughly the same. Its rooms and general ambience are much pleasanter. to some Westerners at least, perhaps because the Hoping is a relic of imperialist days. A.P. Tokyo Correspondent John Roderick, who knew the Hoping as the Palace in 1948, found during his visit last April that it was "aging beautifully...
Chinese hotels are not air conditioned, despite sweltering summers, and the Americans found that room service was undependable. The crude domestic soap and toilet paper was best avoided. Room telephones in the Tung Fang, Roderick discovered, could be made to work once the dialing code was divined (dial 666 for the front desk)-but he had to go downstairs to learn the instructions...
...Quack. Restaurants were good, and food prices downright cheap, even in the best ones. Western dishes were scarce. "We ate Western food only at breakfast," reports Newsday Publisher William Attwood. "It was pretty bad." Roderick found his Chinese meals equaling or surpassing the best of Tokyo's fine Chinese restaurants. "Everything was just delicious," he recalls, "particularly a Peking duck dinner of six or seven courses at only $2.50 per person." Henry Kissinger also enjoyed a Peking duck banquet during his visit last month. "We ate everything but the quack," reported a Kissinger aide. So good was the food...
...turned up and some handicraft items are excellent. Personal honesty is impressively high: travelers find it almost impossible to throw even an exhausted toothbrush away without having a dutiful chambermaid pursue them to return it. Some personal relations, in fact, offer genuine pleasures. "Courtesy and politeness," says Roderick, "will get you treated well almost everywhere in China today...
Late last week the visit of the table tennis team ended, and the visas of some correspondents expired with it. But Rich and Roderick got three-day extensions, and Durdin's visa will last a full month. Observers were encouraged that China had opened its borders to veterans who had known the country before Mao, and might be less easily snowed by tour guides than younger...