It's also a place of dichotomy. Giant skyscrapers tower above huthongs and twisting back alleyways filled with mom and pop shops and street food carts. You can find major designer stores blocks away from a mall dedicated to selling counterfeit "designer" merchandise. Stop telling me those "new balances" are real leather! The ticket machines at the train station will operate in English yet foreign people are not allowed to use them. Children are everywhere you look yet almost no one has any brothers or sisters anymore.
China is wildly different from the United States. Wildly. Well yeah, you might find yourself saying, you are in China what do you expect? I was honestly surprised though when i got here and experienced it for myself. I have had a harder time trying to find people here who speak English than any other country we have travelled so far. Sure, you can find pirated American movies and fast food chains yet Pizza Hut doesn't even sell breadsticks! Such madness!
Yet on another hand I respect a country that has so much pride in their culture and therefor is not influenced by America. China has its own architecture, language, cuisine (including breakfast preferences), tv shows, government, and cultural norms. This is a country with an amazing and intense history filled with emperors, opium, silk, domination, and change. A land where the government has the final say and 700 years ago is considered recent. I have really been enjoying learning more about this culture and I have had so many great experiences. However, I would now like to present you with some of the wackier and surprising gems of China I have witnessed this far... enjoy the insanity.
1. Bizarre public fights/spectacles. Yelling on airplanes. Wrestling at the train station. A girl even bit a guy outside the bar and then ripped off his shirt off. Maybe its just more alarming because I don't understand Mandarin. Can't we all just get along?
2. Food on the menu. Some is amazingly delicious. Other choices include gluttonous frog, goldfish in chicken sauce, baby food with jellyfish, snakehead, and dog meat. The joke told by our driver the other day, "the only thing with four legs we won't eat is a chair!"
3. The spitting. I'm still not used to it. But if you can't beat em, join em!
4. Animal selling
- Puppies out of a baby stroller
- an outdoor stand stand selling fake sunglasses and baby turtles
- a motorcycle with stacked cages on the back of bunnies, hamsters, chicks, and ducks. This one is popular
- fish sold curbside out of baby pools
- man yanking a monkey on a leash on the street in shanghai
5. Group fitness activities at the park. Watching Brad do a dance routine with elderly people in the park gave me a side ache from laughing so hard. Other activities include Tai Chi, kite flying, badminton, sword dancing, and playing cards (which looked strenuous for some)
6. The subway conductor shoving people in like sardines before the door closes on someone's arm. That many people should never fit underground
7. Chinese pharmacy/traditional medicine. Dried herbs, roots, potions, and much more mixed with pharmaceutical medication. I'm not quite sure how a dried sea horse will help anyone get healthier though- to each their own. I prefer some Tylenol.
8. A farmer collecting admission for the Great Wall of China right next to a sign declaring that part of the wall closed to visitors. Can't hold me down!
9. Ballroom dancing in the middle of a packed shopping street
10. Brad getting hit with a rogue flip flop flying through the air on the high speed train from Beijing to Shanghai. I was way to hungover but that was the loudest train ride (passenger wise) of my life
11. Outside a popular bar area they sell giant cartoon balloons and candy. Wasted people are just like big five year olds...
Thanks for all the entertainment China so far it's been crazy! Next up- Suzhou.
Also, special thanks to my dad's colleague Marc who hooked us up with some fabulous hotel rooms and a night to remember in Beijing! I took advantage of the swank hotel and ate my weight in complimentary cheese. Now its back to the life of sub par hostels and adventure.
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