The Pros and the Cons

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.