One Evening in Beijing

I was in Beijing to present a paper in Quality Software engineering symposium. One day, we finished our conference quite early as there were some presentations scheduled in Chinese by local speakers and we knew the lecture in Chinese would fly on top of our head. So we decided to go out in to the city for some site seeing.
We went out to see some top tourist attractions in Beijing such as Forbidden Palace, Temple of Heaven and Tienanmen square. By the time we finished visiting Tienanmen's square, it was dark and we were planning to take a taxi back to our lodge. Just then, a group of 4 young women walking across the street saw us and stopped at us. We gave a smile as we generally did to any other Chinese. They approached us and greeted us in English. It was surprising for us as we saw English speaking locals for the first time. In china, its very difficult to find English speaking people, even the students are not very comfortable speaking English. We responded them in English. They first introduced themselves with their names and their profession.
One of them was a English teacher at a local school and rest were her students. So that clarified why they were able to speak English. They asked about us, our country of origin and reason for our visit etc. Conversation went well and the teacher said that after seeing us they wanted to speak to us in english, so they stopped at us.

We were impressed and took a group picture with them and then we asked them if they could help us negotiate/ask a taxi driver to take us to our lodge. As taxi drivers also didn't speak English, we had tough time negotiating them, so we thought we could borrow their help.
After hearing our stories, they looked anxious to talk to us more, but we were very tired and wanted to get back to lodge as it was very late as well.

Just then, English teacher asked us if we could join them for a cup of Chinese tea at restaurant close by. We thankfully declined but they persisted saying it would be authentic Chinese tea which we never had before and we also would get a chance to see the making of tea there.
Some of us thought it would not be good on our part to decline now. So we decided to give it a try. So we walked about 2-3 blocks behind the road. It was a narrow street and there were very few street lights. Most of the shops were closed and there weren't lots of people walking on the street apart from us. For some reason, that walk started making us think if we did right decision to accept their invite. As we were four of us, we had bit of courage to walk. They kept saying its very closeby and we have almost reached and kept talking to us. After few minutes of walk, we reached the restaurant, it was a small shop with couple of tables inside it. They spoke to the owner of the restaurant and took us inside another small room. They said thats where the tea making items are kept. When we entered the room, we noticed it was very small room with a round table enough for 5-6 people to sit. On top of the table was a group of small glass jars filled with leaves and powder of different colour and sizes.
Some one came to take our orders and one of the lady told something in Chinese. They then started talking to us about some local tourist attractions to visit etc. It took about 20 -30 mins and still no sign of any tea. I had thought that, they gonna prepare tea in front of us on that table but the waiter didn't come back. We started getting suspicious and decided to walk away but then lady tried to stop us by saying she would change the order to something which can be done early. One of us got furious and asked her to take us back to taxi stand with a loud voice. The conversation turned in to argument as she said we can't leave when we place an order. We still needed their help as we were not sure if we can go back to taxi stand by ourselves. So we offered them to pay for the order and leave the place immediately. When we saw the menu, we were in for a shock. Guess what ? One tea costs 95 yuvans. It was ridiculous price considering the type of restuarant and place where it was in. Thats when we knew something was seriously wrong and we are in trouble. We had some costly cameras, mobile phones and some cash with us. So we immediately decided to get out of the place ourselves. As we managed to get out of the restaurant and hurried towards the main road, One of the girl came behind us running. When i turned back, i noticed she had one of our cameras in her hand and she wanted to return it to us. In the midst of panic, my colleague had forgotten the camera in his seat. I stopped to collect it and as I took the camera from her hands, I saw her eyes and noticed she was in tears. She thanked me for joining us and apologized for the inconvinience. I was confused, my colleagues who were ahead of me had managed to stop a passing taxi and asked me to join. I just decided to run and got in to the car.
We had a visiting card of lodge which had the name of lodge printed in Chinese, so we just showed it to driver and asked him to drive us there without bothering about cost. While we were driving back, some us had an expression of relief in their faces as if they escaped a big accident and were thanking god themselves. I was still unsure whats going on and told them about the camera which they returned us but they downplayed it and continued to believe that those women had malicious intentions. We finally reached our lodge safely that night. I went to bed but tossed and turned still thinking and replaying the entire episode in my mind. I still ask myself if we did a right thing by running out of that restaurant under those circumstances that night.