So I decided to make a list of things I like and dislike about China.
***Things I like***
1. The freedom to drink anywhere you want and as much as you want.
2. The niceness and reasonableness of the police.
3. The beautiful girls.
4. The fact that the beautiful girls find me very handsome.
5. People are very friendly.
6. People are not fat.
7. Everyone loves children. In some countries they are often seen as an annoyance. Here, a baby may cry like crazy on a train and everyone is just happy that the baby is alive.
8. There is no promotion of manly-macho insecurity, i.e. there are no "rules" about what a real man should or should not do.
9. The families are very close. A few examples. Grandparents, since they are retired, view it as their duty to take care of the grandchildren as a help to their children who have jobs to do. A father may have to work two thousand kilometers away and only see his family 3-4 times a year but this will not make his children bitch and moan later about how dad didn't spend enough time with them.
10. No tipping-anywhere, not in restaurants, not for cab drivers, not doormen. Well except the guys that massage your back in nightclubs when you take a piss at the urinal, you're supposed to tip them but if you don't that's ok too. I, for one, no longer use the urinals in night clubs and go for the closed door stall b/c I don't enjoy a back rub while taking a piss, but to each his own.
11. No racial tension.
12. The food. (though I am not a fan of dog meat, silk worm, skorpion, tiger penis, bird puke soup, live monkey brains, bear bile wine, rotten poisonous snake wine, endangered bird dishes, aborted baby soup-no I am not joking, I will discuss this one in another post)
13. The communal eating style in the homes and restaurants. Everything that is ordered is for everyone at the table, so if you have 4 people will probably order about 6 dishes and everyone pulls what they like from each plate into your personal bowl to put on top of the rice. Also, everyone gets as loud as they want and it's all good.
14. The street food vendors--stinky tofu or one of 8 kinds of noodles or corn on the cob or sweet potato or various steamed/boiled/fried dumplings or various pancakes or sugar cane or barbeque of your choice of 15 kinds of meat and seafood--it's all super cheap, anywhere from 17-34 cents an order. There are also meat options but that's not for me.
15. The trains. It's a great train system and really cheap. They are also putting in new lines of fast trains that cost a bit more but are 2-3 times faster. You can get anywhere by train and a sleeper ticket is cheap, you get a (relatively) clean bed and the train is smooth and quiet.
16. No political correctness. This may be the best one. Just say what you want and what you mean. You think someone is fat, tell 'em.
17. It's much easier to talk to people even with the language barrier. There seems to be much less second guessing of what someone means. This is certainly an overgeneralization, but here if someone gives you a compliment, they mean it, if they criticize you, then they just criticize you, they don't need to be sarcastic or beat around the bush about it and secretly harbor resentment.
18. The shops. There are small shops everywhere. It seems that they are approximately 2 small shops for every person in this city. Every street is lined with tiny shops and they all have friendly people with something random for sale. You can pick any street in the city and just walk and look around.
***Things I don't like***
1. The weather in Nanchang. Always hot or cold and often all in one day. But this con doesn't necessarily apply to all of China.
2. The air pollution--at night you can usually only see a few stars, sometimes none. When the pollution is really bad, you can't see any stars during the night or day--and that's really bad, b/c you really hope to see at least 1 star in a 24 hour period--the big one that's in our solar system.
That's all.
So I almost forgot about this aspect of living in China until last night when a neighbor set off fireworks right outside my window that were so loud I was sure someone was shooting off fully automatic weapons outside. They also gave off a ridiculous amount of smoke. In China, you hear fireworks go off about every 2-3 hours-seriously. Fireworks are set off to celebrate moving in somewhere, moving out of somewhere, getting a new job, having a baby, being happy, the night beginning, the day beginning, it being 9 o'clock, etc. My college sets off fireworks at 9pm every night just for fun. The college next door sets off fireworks at 11pm every night. The college across the street sets off fireworks every morning at 6 am!!! And this doesn't include all the students and residents that set off their personal fireworks. I almost don't notice it anymore but apparently when Spring Festival takes place-that's part of the Chinese New Year in late January and February, for the entire ~30 days of Spring Festival, everyone will set off fireworks many times per day and night. Oh and fireworks are illegal here because they could start fires, but of course "illegal" is a flexible term which in this case means completely legal.
So I visited Nanjing with another FT (foreign teacher) last weekend. That's him next to me in one pic. We took a 12 hour overnight train and were able to get a sleeper so that was great. You go to bed on the train, wake up in the morning and you've arrived. Nanjing (literally: "southern capital") is the capital city of Jiansu province and is the former capital of China. It has many historic places though we only had 2 days to spend there so did not get too see many places. We did go to the Japanese Invasion museum, a huge free museum which focuses on the Japanese invasion of Nanjing in 1937, known as the Nanjing Massacre. One pic with a cross shows the front of the museum. Over a period of 6 weeks the Japanese invaders killed about 300,000 Nanjing residents, burned down many parts of Nanjing, raped over 20,000 women, etc. This museum was rough, it's entirely black in color, has the most forboding music and lighting possible and has absolutely grotesque exhibits. There are pictures people being cut up and shot, women being raped and there are some mass graves that have been opened and the decomposed bodies are now on display. All in all, I am not sure I would recommend going to this museum. There are many beautiful places in Nanjing though. There's a huge lake in the middle of the city with many very old buildings and to the east part of town there is a large scenic mountain to climb. The thing I did not like about Nanjing is how many foreigners there are. It's very similar to Beijing, everywhere you go you see at least 1-2 foreigners. There are many foreign stores and restaurants, we went to an Irish pub and there were at least 50 Europeans, Australians and Americans there--I felt like I was not in China. It was cool being able to drink Guiness which was as good as it was in London (better than in the US) and cost about as much as it did in London. We also went to a 50% foreign nightclub and that was pretty cool (see pic), but overall I wasn't digging it. I have gotten used to being the only foreigner everywhere I go, so this was all a little strange. It also seems that when you are around foreigners in China who are large enough in number to have their own community they are more likely to be complaining. That seems to be the main topic of conversation--bitching about China in one way or another: "the Chinese spit on the floor...the Chinese are stupid...the air is bad...the weather is bad...blah blah blah". It's really rather annoying, you gotta wonder why they left their homeland to begin with. I like China so much I definitely couldn't get into the complaining spirit. But overall it was an interesting and fun short trip, and I successfully was able to find the cga card for my computer that I had a tough time finding in Nanchang :-)