Work and Mandarin lessons are keeping me pretty busy during the week. As I guessed, daily updates to the blog are getting more difficult to pull off. With that said, it’s time for a mid-week update!
So … I figured it out! Well, sorry of. Somehow I managed to install the ICBC China app on my phone and could login! But it wasn’t easy; it was another adventure, this time with a happy ending.
Don’t even ask how I was able to install an app that is available only to those who have bought a cellphone from a Chinese provider, but I got it done. And after it was installed it was time to log in to my account.
Let’s play a game for a moment: Close your eyes right now and picture trying to create and then log into your account for any app. No, really… Close your eyes and picture how that might be done. Now change all the English you’re picturing to Chinese. Near impossible, right?
Thankfully I came up with an great idea: Since I have two phones I could use Google Translate & the cell phone camera to “live translate” the banking phone app on my other phone! If you’re not familiar with this feature of Google Translate, basically you can use the app in camera mode and point it at printed material like a menu or book and it will attempt to translate from one language into another. (Yeah, I know but only because I found out about it tonight… You can do it all with only one phone by taking a screenshot and sending that screenshot to Google Translate…I digress.)
The process was slow but in the end I was able to navigate enough to create my account, set new password, and pass the 2FA (two-factor authentication) challenge. It only took about two hours to get done. Uggh. But, I was able to get logged in and see my balance. Yay!
Then, after I called this process a qualified success, I decided to do a few other things around the apartment. While I was folding laundry an idea came too me: Maybe I can now log into the English language version of the ICBC website. Previously this was tried but never successfully as an error kept being displayed saying my account is broken and I should go to the ICBC branch and speak with someone. This time things were different! Apparently logging in on the mobile phone app triggers something behind the scene and the website became unblocked and allowed me to login. Boooh yeah! Much easier than navigating the Chinese language phone app.
Next banking related tasks:
- Figure out how to checking my balance via WeChat (if possible)
- Determine how to move money from this bank account to my account in the USA so I can pay some bills from back home
Both will be daunting for sure!