China is soooo frippin big, hory fetch. Shanghai has 25 million people, Beijing has 22 million and there is another city here, whose name I can’t ever remember, that has 30 million!! It’s retarded. The sheer amount of people here really has shaped their behavior in different ways. In my opinion, the fact that they don’t have good peripheral vision has driven some of their cultural mores, i.e. not paying attention lining up for tickets or at buffets, and driving super slow and retarded. Chinese people drive like how they get in (or fail to get in) line – totally chaotically. If someone on the street wants to drive fast (which is rare, but I’ve seen it), they just drive on the other side of the road. Yesterday, I saw a U-turn from the right lane of a six lane road. There are three intersections near the company I’m working at that have no traffic signals (no lights or stop signs)!!! And these are huge mother-packin 6-lane intersections like 7th east and 45th south in the Salt Lake Valley.

I never thought I had a bubble until I came to the mother land. They don’t have a lot of personal space here. My boss and I were walking in Tiananmen Square and two visiting Chinese university girls started walking-talking to us because we were foreigners and they wanted to speak English. They were such close talkers! What the Sirius Fudge? We were just minding our own business trying to walk from one side to the other (in the traditional straight-line fashion), but they were talking so close that we found ourselves slowly inching some personal space, making a large arc-pattern through one of the largest city squares on earth. Hilarious.

Hungry Chinese people chew with their mouths open, wide fetchin’ open. It’s normal here. I think it is so they can taste their food better. For me, you ask?, the more time I spend in China, the fewer ‘chews’ I take and the more closed my mouth stays so I CAN'T taste the flippin’ food. It’s almost as if food loses its taste unless you are the loudest one at the table. What the crumb, Nee-HOW!? So far, the new foods I have muscled down since my first Chinese voyage are duck head, ox intestine, and sautéed tofu: terrible on all three counts. And, of course I’ve been graced by the old favorites, including pig ears, chicken feet and the ever-so-pleasantly textured sea cucumber: still tasty; taste-a-rika-poopoo, that is.

I was amazed at all the fetchers that tried to sell me worthless stuff, and worthless services. I saw a cab driver that, when I said I was going to walk back to my hotel and didn’t need a ride, claimed it would be cheaper for me to take his cab than walk. What the crap, haha!!? Who could argue with that? I went on a bus tour of the Great Wall of China with 10 other foreign tourists. On the way there, they funneled us through a jade factory and a Chinese herbal medicine clinic. I gotta admit I bought a little bit of jade and stared in amazement at the huge jade statues that this place housed. When we got in the herbal medicine factory (which, by the way, had the sickest bathroom in Asia – crazy considering this was an establishment with doctors, medical advice, and modern medicine speeches), a girl in a lab coat spent 7 or 8 minutes totally babbling about how hella-sweet herbal medicating is: something about too much heat in your body, the Chinese doctor, and a totally-tubular ability to read your pulse. Through her thick accent and even thicker eye-glasses, this girl stood in front of our group in this grossly unsanitary ‘clinic’ and rambled on and on. Definitely TMI; no, actually it was more like NEMI. All she really needed say was, “Chinese doctors are way more awesome than Western doctors. They take your pulse, tell you there is too much heat in your body, and then force-sell you ‘prescriptions’ of ginseng and gingko biloa to cure the magically diagnosed liver and kidney problems you are unnecessarily suffering from.”

Seriously though, China has so much history and mystique, it is a wonderful country. For millennia, the people of china have been forced to bow down to cruel and lavish emperors, build awe inspiring temples, harvest rice and fish from the land and rivers and seas and sacrifice their lives in constructing one of the great marvels on earth: the Great Wall. This history has made Chinese people what they are today: very polite, as is evidenced by the constant bowing they do (which has been reinforced by centuries of worshipping their government leaders, IMHO). If any demographic in America thinks its is oppressed, a visit to china to witness the 80 year old women packing bundles of sticks on the back of a bike going 2 maybe 3 mph tops returning home from a 6 mile round trip to their miniscule plot of land.

If I was up against such cultural and historical difficulties, I’d be pretty ticked off, too. I wouldn’t wait in lines, stay in my lane, chew with my mouth closed, or wait for someone else to finish their sentence before I starting talking either. Screw ‘em, right? I don’t know what rates in China are for crime, car accidents, public fighting, or tongue-biting, but they couldn’t be worse than the rates in the US. I applaud all Chinese people for maintaining such self-control, given the crap they’ve spent centuries wading through. We should all be a little bit more like the Chinese and laugh out loud with mouths full of fish and noodles. Why not?...we’d definitely riv ronger.

For real though, what a great experience it is to come to the Orient. The people are friendly and gracious, although eccentric in certain ways. They really do appreciate us and are very good hosts. I am lucky to have these opportunities.