My Phone Was Stolen in China

I thought it was a date, but I lost my phone.

Kade Maijala
Globetrotters
3 min readJan 2, 2023

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Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels

Maybe I’m too trusting, but I thought I would have a great date. I was in Yantai, China, in 2020. I worked in a school on the third floor of a large building.

I visited a fruit store on the second floor every day, and I’d become good friends with one of the girls that worked there. After a long while, I had gotten her to agree to go to the beach with me.

We were heading out around 7 PM when the sun set on this beautiful summer night. I thought I would have a good time but little did I know I would be out $1,000 by night’s end.

At the beach

Yantai Beach photographed by HaoLinFotos on Wikimedia Commons

Once we arrived, we chatted for an hour or so until it was dark out. It was expected, nothing special. I always chat about how I like to go swimming. She asked if she could see me dive into the water.

I should’ve known something was up.

I agreed, jumped in, and she told me to swim around some more. She stayed by the crest of the water the whole time. Ten minutes later, my phone was gone when we returned to our spot.

My first instinct was to ask the girl if she had it.

No, we left it on the bench.

Well, that’s not good. I thought perhaps it fell in the shallow end of the water. I jumped in to scan the bottom of the ocean. Five minutes passed, and I went back. Something was wrong, though.

My date was gone.

She disappeared into thin air. I understood what had happened; she had made off with the phone.

The Next Day

My friend and I headed to the fruit shop the next day. She wasn’t there like she usually was, so we asked the other worker where she was.

“She called in and said she quit.”

Well, shit.

I learned an important lesson from this I should’ve known earlier. Don’t trust your phone with someone on the first date. If they get the opportunity, they may run off with it.

Have you had something stolen from you in another country? Comment down below, and let’s chat!

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