8 Interesting Facts About China

During my stay here, I came across some very interesting facts about China, which my geography teacher failed to teach me. My Chinese friends were so generous, that they provided me with this rare knowledge. I just hope that these facts are really true and they have not got lost in translation! :)

(1) Number four and number seven are the least favourite numbers among Chinese people. According to one of my Chinese friends it is because of the fact, that these two words resemble other not so popular terms: death and poverty. Some buildings even do not have the fourth floor because of that!

(2) Young people of the same age often call each other "brother" or "sister", even though they are not related. I guess they compensate their lack of siblings this way...

(3) It is not right to take pictures of the statues of gods in the temples, because it is considered disrespectful. I have been told about this just recently and I feel guilty every time I go through my pictures from all the temples I visited...

(4) English language is completely useless outside the biggest cities  - people in rural areas usually speak only Chinese. I found many of them quite sociable though, I have already had some nice Chinese-Slovakian conversations, which lasted about 5 minutes without any problem.

(5) When somebody has a birthday, he gives his classmates dried meat instead of candies as we do at school. (Did, in my case. It has been a long time, since I celebrated my birthday at school this way.) At least my students do so, I cannot imagine this in poorer parts of China.

(6) They do not have a Name Day in here, because they come up with their own original names. The name usually has two or three syllables, because, as one my Chinese friend says: the name with four syllables would sound too Japanese.

(7) Students during their last year at high school spend there seven days a week, from early mornings until late in the evenings. When I asked one seventeen year old girl about her hobbies, she couldn't really tell me - she has no hobbies, she spends all her time at school: competition is fierce and she want to attend a really good university some day.

(8) People don't care here much about the age limit, when it comes to drinking alcohol. I have read that they set up 18 years old as legal drinking age only in the year 2006, so I guess, they just haven't got used to it yet.

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It is not far. It is not spicy. It is not so hot.

It is not far. It is not spicy. It is not so hot.
The meaning of these statements probably got lost in translation from Chinese to English. If a Chinese person says something like this, for sure he doesn't think of the same thing as you (in case you are from Europe).

(1) It is not so far.

When my Chinese friends say that it is not far, they are very likely referring to the place, to which you can get by bus in one hour. The only problem usually is, that we are planning to go somewhere on foot. But hey, China is so big, everything seems so close...

(2) It is not so hot.

It is hot. It is 40 degrees Celsius. It is really hot, just trust me.

(3) It is not spicy.

Well, this sentence must be said at least once while eating with a foreigner. A foreigner (a.k.a. me) is sweating like a pig and her face got ultrared and he is crying like a baby, because all that spice in the food. But no, it is not spicy.

And now when I am in Chongqing, they are even proud of it. (And I am quite desperate, because I have tried to say "not spicy" in Chinese, but it seems to me, that they use some other dialect of Chinese in here. Or I should probably just admit, that I suck in speaking Chinese, although I am trying hard to get the right tones.)

But at least I am here. Not everyone is so lucky to get the train tickets during the summer. They are usually being sold 10 days in advance (please notice the word "usually"). When me and my friend Aga tried to get the tickets for our travels around China, we were not so lucky. Day after day, every morning we went to the train station with my Chinese friend (who has done all the talking, thank god) to ask if they already sell the tickets to the cities we planned to visit. The answer was always the same: "No, please come later." And suddenly, boom, one morning - all the tickets were already sold! (I still have no idea, how that happened, but we just accepted it and chose another route.)

Welcome to China!

But I love it here. I love chasing after non-spicy food, I love that it is never cold and I love how big China is, because you can travel here forever and it never gets old.

Modern Chongqing.

Old Chongqing.

Sleeping in the train... 55 people in one big room.

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Dead or alive? Hm...

I like teaching and I love my students, but sometimes I just want to throw them out of the window, because as teenagers, their behaviour is hugely affected by the hormonal changes in their bodies.

Luckily, I found out that crosswords have really calming effects on them, so I always take these out of my bag in the times of crises. And I invented even better cure for their bad behaviour: postcards from Slovakia. They are willing to do anything just to get one single postcard.

When I talked about Slovakia and I showed them a couple of pictures of High Tatras, Bratislava and some castles They were like woooow, oooh and they just repeated how beautiful it all is. I guess it would be a nice idea to send these kids to Slovakia from time to time, so that Slovak people would realize the beauty of their own country.

Last lesson I got a surprise from my youngest student. She came to me holding a glass with a bat in it. Unfortunately, because of her age and lack of English vocabulary, she couldn't tell me, if it was dead or alive. I was not sure then, if it is an animal corpse or her new pet (both options seemed quite unsettling to me). Now I know it is a pet. It looks like a dog combined with a rat and it officially attends all my classes.

As it is impossible for the foreigners to remember Chinese names, children always give themselves names, that sound more international. Usually they somehow resemble their original Chinese names, but sometimes they just reveal a specific interests of their bearers. For example, in my class, there are boys with the names like Transformers, Zero, Bruce Lee and Armstrong.

The teaching is mostly fun, but from time to time, I have bad days. I take someone's mobile phone, because he's playing with it all the time; send somebody outside the classroom; my clothes, face and hands are all white because of that stupid chalk; computer stops working and projector is making funny sounds; I break the door; throw the shrimp at myself during lunch, because I suck at using chopsticks.

And on the top of that, there is a Chinese kid crying in the classroom and I don't know why and I can't help him...

But the days are slowly passing by and I am getting used to the food, weather and people here. And in my mind, I have these kind of thoughts: I will miss China, when I come back home...

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The traffic fun

I guess there are some traffic rules here and lights work quite well, just everybody seems to ignore it perfectly. People drive their vehicles like crazy; buses, taxis, cars and motorbikes are everywhere, literally fighting for their little piece of road. The only rule is that there are no rules. Overtaking from the ride side? No problem. To survive, you need just one little thing – any kind of functional vehicle horn. During my first days here, I was afraid to cross the road, because I was afraid I might just get killed. Now? I run through six-lane road with twenty children, crosswalk nowhere in my sight. It is casual here, right? I just hope, that my kids have superhero-quick reactions, because the drivers are very lazy to even slow down a little bit, and it doesn't really matter if you are using crosswalk or not.

Sidewalks are not much better for me. Only after you take care after bunch of Chinese teenagers in the city of two and half million inhabitants, you can say you know what it is like to look for a needle in a haystack. There is usually distance of a one kilometer between the quickest and the slowest one and I guess we would need the same number of students and teachers to really look after each and every one of them.

I already got used to the fact that Chinese people drive anything that has the wheels attached. They are usually very creative in customizing their vehicles according to their needs. The most popular are sunshades or similar things protecting the drivers from the sun. And I have also come across one guy, who had a fan attached to his steering wheel, so that it blows cold air right into his face. The sight of the whole family (father, mother and child) on one motorbike is not rare here. Only responsible minority of people wears a helmet. You can even catch a taxi-motorbike, but I haven’t tried it yet, normal taxi seems to me fun enough.

Travelling around small (Chinese -small, not European small) cities is basically cheap. One or two Yuans (around 0,11 EUR) will get you from one side of the city to another one, when travelling by bus. Only front door is used for getting on, as you have to pay by throwing the money (coins as well as paper money) into the funny crapping box. You get seldom any kind of ticket in return. And don't hesitate when getting of the bus, some drivers don't really wait for anybody - we tried couple of times how adventurous it is when you jump out of the bus already moving.

For shorter distances, say three or four kilometers, you might as well use the taxi, if you are in the group of four people as it would cost probably almost the same.

I am adding some pictures, so that you can enjoy the "traffic culture" in China too.

Vehicle/street shop

Do you want to rent a motorbike?

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Hey, beautiful teacher!

The kids just cannot remember my name. But they call me in such a cute way, I can't be mad at them at all.

Teaching children (and teenagers!) how to speak English is not always easy, especially when their mother tongue is Chinese (not to mention the fact I am no native speaker either and my mother tongue is Slovakian). Sometimes after two hours of teaching I am covered in sweat not only because outside it is forty degrees in shadow and AC in the classroom stopped working a long long time ago.

Suddenly I am on the other side of teacher-student relationship, I am the one who demands from the students to answer my questions in a whole sentence and I want them to tell me their opinions on boring topics. It feels so different.

One of my kids really likes to talk to me in Chinese, even though I beg him thousand times to speak English. Sometimes, when I am too tired to quarrel with him, I just talk to him in Slovak language, and only then he stops talking and looks at me quite desperately.

But most of the children can create a sentence or two in English, the only problem is that they do not want to. I have been told that it is normal in China to have a language class where seventy kids just write down something teacher writes on the blackboard. Maybe that is the reason why they are so unwilling to talk sometimes.

I learned one thing by my teaching experience as well: I do not have the feeling that all Chinese kids look the same any more. Well, at the beginning I thought I would be completely lost while trying to remember their names and I wished they never changed their clothes, but now, one thing is for sure – each and every one of my kids is different from the others.

And one last observation: my Chinese friends do not think they have slanted eyes. They didn't believe us, that this is what most European people think about their eyes. Even better! They think that my eyes are slanted. Well, I guess there are some cultural differences in perception of reality between Europe and Asia.

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Maybe I will not stay hungry after all

Today, I finally managed to call the waitress in Chinese at the restaurant. I think it is a really great achievement, so I decided to celebrate it by writing something new on this little blog of mine.

It is really hard for me to get the attention of waitress here, because most of Chinese seem to me quite noisy. They are constantly shouting while talking, although they might sit right next to each other. In the streets - well, “everywhere” is more precise location, there is incredible noise. And to make it even harder, it takes a lot of time and patience for me to pronounce any Chinese word correctly. Usually I end up being laughed at by the bunch of my Chinese friends. Well, Chinese is undoubtedly difficult language. (That is the reason, why I feel superhero-like after getting attention of Chinese waitress.)

Concerning eating out in China I have another success to share with you – I finally managed to eat like a horse. Maybe it happened because I am getting better in eating with chopsticks. And I asked them to make the food in the non-spiciest way they are able to, maybe that helped, too. Anyway, it was fantastic feeling.

But when it comes to accommodation - bad news, everyone! If you can think of squat toilette and above it the shower, both behind the iron door on the staircase outside, you have the precise idea of our bathroom. I said to myself, though, that I am not going to complain all the time like a spoilt little girl. This is not supposed to be a wellness holiday anyway. So I activated the brave part of me and tried to enjoy my unusual living conditions and coped with the giant beetle I had to throw out of our room, because none of my roomies seemed to be planning to do so, as they were too busy with screaming.

But you know, outside, in the streets, one quickly forgets about all beetles and disgusting toilette. Chinese people seem very open to me and they treat each other with unusual joviality. At least the Chinese kids that are accompanying me behave that way all the time. And as we are foreigners, everyone here stares at us as though we had the horns on our heads. Sometimes they look at us with horror in the eyes, sometimes they smile. Our guides said it is because we are in a small city (I am trying to understand, but honestly, in what sense can be the city with two and half million inhabitants small?) and foreigners here are quite rare.

I think I should like another thing about my accommodation, but somehow, I do not feel excited about it at all. Above my bed, there is a mosquito net, an item, which I found extremely romantic during my whole teenage life. But here, it seems to me just like the ordinary thing. Another life-saving necessity. At least those stupid mosquitos don’t eat me alive.

I uploaded some pictures this time. Enjoy.

Just an ordinary street in Suizhou.

What an awesome billboard!

Nearby Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan.

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The very beginning of my journey

It is one of good manners in AIESEC – to set up your own travel blog during your internship abroad. Though I had been planning to break this unwritten rule, as soon as I spent my first day in China, I decided to change my mind and fulfill my almost sick desire to write. (So far, I am just staring at all the things around, unable to take the camera out of my bag, so I cannot upload any photos. But I will, later, I promise.)

Nine and half hours of the flight to Beijing didn't seem so long to me, maybe because of the chatty Cathy (well, actually it was a man) sitting next to me. He was trying some Jedi trick on me – he spent about half an hour convincing me, that Chinese language has similar pronunciation to English language. Well, I am not weak minded, I can see the big difference.

Somewhere in the air above Ulaanbaatar, I thought about one part of Fringe series, where a strange man brought some super weird substance that caused everybody on the plane to die in a horrible way, you know, blood, skin, flesh and stuff dropping on the floor, disgusting scene. Thankfully, it didn't happen during our flight, we just experienced some nasty turbulence above Mongolia.

In Beijing, I found out, that there is such a thing in this world like a hot fog. It is everywhere, crawling around your legs like a steam in sauna. Until this very moment, I still cannot believe, that pilot was able to land in that awful zero visibility. I transferred then to the flight to Wuhan, being probably the only foreign passenger on the plane. None of the stewardess seemed to care, they talked to me solely in Chinese.

I am not very keen on stating generalizations of nations, but still, I have to remark, that some of Chinese people tend to be very noisy during eating. (Some of them on the airplane even sounded like dementors who are trying to suck out your soul – it was scary, but I guess it is their normal way to eat noodles).

But the Chinese kids here are awesome, they help us with everything we need and not all of them make these dementor sounds.

The worst part here so far is probably the food. First, I am only the beginner in eating with chopsticks (actually I tried to eat using them for the first time in China) and second, the food! Everything here is so spicy! And what I have seen here… hairy peas and superstinky tofu on your plate with the chicken head (eye included) and its gnarled feet. And McDonald's is not going to save me, even hamburgers here are somehow spicier than in Europe.

Everyone here thinks of me as some tall and slim women from east Europe, I could be a model, they say. Well, maybe after this kind of diet, it will become reality… (Except for the east European part, I still believe, that Slovakia is in the central Europe).

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