China - Cultural Differences

China is different from the West in many many ways. During our first couple of weeks we have slowly learned the local etiquette and customs. The following is a summary of cultural differences, organized by setting:

In a restaurant:

* You will be given one menu, no matter how many people are sitting at your table.

* A waitress will show up immediately and wait at your table for you to submit the order. If you take your time with the order, she will sit at the table opposite from you, looking around impatiently. After about 10 minutes, she will walk away. You'll have to yell out for her to come back for the order. She may or may not spit in your food for this.
* If you're lucky, the menu will have pictures of the dishes (nice places only). If you're really lucky, the menu will have some 'English' on it (see 'Language').

* Sometimes you get tea, sometimes you don't. Sometimes it's free, sometimes it's added to your bill without your knowledge. Sometimes the tea is actual tea, sometimes it's hot water with a little color.

* The dishes come out in the order in which they are ready (dessert may be first in line).

* The dishes are all family-style! Big plate in the middle, from which every diner chopsticks a portion off to the personal plate.

* If a dish is marked 'vegetarian,' it almost certainly has ham in it.

* If a dish is marked 'hot,' it is inedible. Don't try; don't be a hero; and it doesn't matter how much rice you mix it with.. Unless you're out of Pseudoephedrine, just let it be.

* No matter where you are eating, you are in the 'smoking' section.

* Everything is fair game for lunch: scorpions, star fish, chicken feet, month-old pickled eggs, boiled lotus roots, worms, everything.

Language:

* Chinese is sing-song, which means you can't speak (even if you know what the word looks like in English). To demonstrate: 'thank you' in Chinese is 'xie xie.' You'd have to say that 4-5 times while bowing before you will be understood. Luckily, it works the other way around too -- when Chinese people speak 'English,' it still sounds a lot like Chinese.

* Chinese is also character-based, which means you are instantly illiterate.

* As a result, you're as helpless as it gets, thrown to the mercy of the sporadic Chinglish signs (see below). You can be standing at a bus station, looking at a whole schedule of all regional buses, and simply begin crying, because you can't decipher a thing, and no one around you understands what you're saying.

* Where Chinese is translated to English, the translation uses the Chinglish version. To demonstrate: "no not walking grass" (stay off grass), "mixed fungus soup with lamp" (mushroom lamb soup), "pedestrian goes away" (path closed to visitors), "civilized citizens walks near bicycle" (please walk your bicycle). Yes, our English has suffered.

* We are communicating with our hands quite a bit, but the Chinese get shy when trying to express themselves in English. An inside source told us that they're not too shy otherwise.

* Most hotel receptionists do not speak English either. Moreover, waiters in restaurants rarely know the words 'menu,' or 'meat,' or 'check.' This makes life here fun and exhausting.

People:

* Although China has quite a few Western tourists now, their numbers pale in comparison with the 1.3 billion Chinese tourists that travel all over their own country. We got to observe both the urbanites and the tourists from more remote areas.

* Chinese people smile, chuckle, waive, and say 'hellooo' to Westerners. They also spit, farm-blow their noses (and then wipe their hands on themselves), and smoke. In fact, 'no smoking' signs are often favorite smoker spots to light a few up.

* When part of a tourist group, Chinese people mob the streets in a formation, wearing neon-orange caps and following a guy with a flag.

* Chinese people enjoy bargaining, usually starting with a price about 12 times the item's worth.

* Chinese people have little occupational fear. Neither do they have sympathy towards any members of the animal kingdom.

On the road:

* The right of way is very simple: the bigger vehicle has the right of way. Very easy to enforce, too.

* Drivers remain calm under all circumstances, including the casual near-collisions while honking away.

* In a pedestrian form, however, the Chinese panic all the time. Most panic can be seen in bus stations when busses pull in, and men, women, and children throw themselves at the front door like shipwreck survivors, their contorted war faces stretching out of the turmoil.

* Some cities, such as Kunming, have no left turns, but only u-turns.

* As for the means of transportation, everything goes here as well: bikes, motorbikes, electric bikes, motorbikes with a car top (seriously), cars with three wheels, truck-bikes (bikes with a whole bed in the back), horses, trucks with an engine hanging out, everything. The diversity of polluting agents in this country is vast.

Those are the major culture differences in a nutshell. Adventure-specific stories coming up!